Ok, I think I can provide some insight into this that I think it’s missed on other replies.

I switched to Arch back when Arch had an installer, yup, that’s right, Arch used to have an installer, then they removed it and you had to do most of the process manually (yes, I know pacstrap is technically an installer, but I’m talking about the original ncurses installer here).

After Arch removed its installer it began to attract more purists, and with that the meme was born, people online would be discussing stuff and someone would explain something simple and the other would reply with “I use arch BTW”, which meant you didn’t need to explain trivial stuff because the person had a good idea on how their system works.

Then Arch started to suffer from being too good of a distro, see those of us that were using it consistently saw posts with people complaining about issues on their distros that never affected us, so a sort of “it doesn’t happen on my distro” effect started to grow, putting that together with the excellent wiki that people were linking left and right (even for non Arch users) and lots of people became interested.

This new wave of users was relatively new to Linux, they thought that by following a tutorial and running a couple of command lines when installing arch they had become complete experts in Linux, and they saw the “I use Arch btw” replies and thought they meant “I know more than you because I use Arch”, so they started to repeat that. And it became common to see posts with people being L337 H4ck3r5 with no clue whatsoever using “I use Arch btw”.

That’s when the sort of cult mentality formed, you had experienced people who liked Arch because it was a good distro that didn’t break on its own with good documentation to help when you screw up, these people suffered a bit from this and told newbies that they should use Arch. Together with that you had the other group who thought because they installed Arch they were hackers telling people Arch was waaaay too hard, and that only true Linux experts should use it. From the outside this must have felt that we were hiding something, you had several people telling you to come to our side or they couldn’t help you, or pointing at documentation that looked specific for their distro, and others saying you weren’t cool enough for it probably felt like a cult recruiting.

At the end of the day Arch is a very cool distro, I’ve tried lots of them but prefer Arch because it’s a breeze to maintain in the long run. And the installation process is not something you want to throw at a person who just wants to install Linux to check it out, but it’s also not complicated at all. There are experts using Ubuntu or other “noob” distros because at the end of the day it’s all the same under the hood, using Arch will not make you better at Linux, it will just force you to learn basic concepts to finish the installation that if you had been using Linux for a while you probably already know them (e.g. fstab or locale).

As for Ubuntu, part of it stems from the same “I use Arch btw” guys dumping on Ubuntu for being “noob”, other part is because Canonical has a history of not adoption community stuff and instead try to develop their own thing, also they sent your search queries to Amazon at some point which obviously went very badly for their image in the community.

What problem are you having? Docker is very straightforward, just copy the compose file and run a command.

Kodi is a graphical app, like Firefox, so you won’t use docker for it.

Yup, my steam controller is able to wake it up, haven’t had luck with the 8bitdo yet, but I still haven’t give it a try more than just plugging it and giving it a quick check

The one in the steamdeck does, which is how it achieves the ability to be woken from a controller.

Small correction, only the OLED model has that, it’s essentially the only gripe I have with my Deck.

I have Jellyfin running for years too and it has never broken for me, I use Linuxserver image, so maybe they delay the updates a bit?.. Now, Immich has broken so many times that nowadays is the only docker I don’t keep at latest (and I know using latest is a bad practice, I understand the reasons, but the convenience of not worrying about the versions beats all that for me)

Configuration is much easier, e.g. this is the full config you need to expose nextcloud on nextcloud.example.com (assuming caddy can reach nextcloud using the hostname nextcloud)

nextcloud.example.com {
        reverse_proxy nextcloud
}

Comparing that to ngnix configs that need a template for each different service (although to be fair they’re mostly the same).

My point is that of those 120 probably 110 have never been compromised nor forced you to change the password due to expiration policies. The remaining 10 are the ones that require some mental gymnastics, so while the problem exists it’s not as serious as it sounds. I probably have more than 120 identities using this method since I’ve been using it for years, and I don’t think I ever had to use the counter, it’s a matter of being consistent in how you think about websites, for example if you know how you refer to a site slugify it and use that for the field, so you would use spotify, netflix, amazon-prime.

Yeah, it’s probably a legal thing, rreading-glasses is just metadata for books, completely legal, but readarr legality is less clear, so maybe they’re trying to prevent issues.

Also I didn’t understand what is rreading-glasses and why you need it

Say you want to grab a book by Isaac Asimov, you type the name of the book in readarr search bar, readarr contacts a metadata provider to show you cover images, author, date, etc. Then when you select the book readarr uses that metadata to search for downloads and ensure you’re getting the correct book and not another random book with the same name.

The problem is that readarr uses a closed source API for it’s metadata, and it’s constantly offline, which makes it impossible to use readarr. Luckily they allow you to customize the URL for the API, and rreading-glasses is an open source implementation of that API that you can use as a drop in replacement.

Yup, but most of that is easily solvable by being consistent, e.g. always use lowercase and your email (even if it’s not the login for that site). But yes, you need to know to be consistent so it’s a good point to make.

I noticed that my Ansible playbook failed to do a docker pull on readarr, I just commented it and was going to investigate further today. This sucks, especially because rreading-glasses did in fact completely solve the issue they’re facing. Not sure why they didn’t consider migrating to it officially, it’s only a config change.

It’s strange how I never see this mentioned anywhere, but there’s a way to get unique secure passwords for every site/app without needing to store them anywhere. It’s called LessPass, and essentially generates passwords based on 3 fields (site, username, master password) and works relatively well, because the advantages are quite obvious I’ll list the potential downsides:

• If one password is compromised or needs changing for whatever reason you need to increase a counter and need to remember which counter for which site (this is less problematic than it sounds, except in places that have a password policy that forces you to change your password periodically)
• Android can store the master password and use fingerprint to input it, but in PC you always have to type your master password which can get annoying.
• You need to change your passwords to this new format, which can take a while, and years down the line you’re trying to login somewhere and don’t remember if you’ve already migrated it or not.

Damn, I thought I had sent the reply and it’s been erased.

I’ll keep it short, muscle memory for qwerty doesn’t go away that easily, at least it didn’t for me, but I’m able to type blindly in qwerty (just not touch typing). Still I think that something I can use in my laptop is very useful so I can keep the ergonomics on the go.

I don’t have the exercises, it was just something someone told me to do, I’m sure whatever your doctor is telling you would be better.

For the split vs ortholinear I think split makes more difference, whenever I use a normal keyboard I feel this, but never had any pains related to it, it’s just more comfortable.

Why not use thefuck which also corrects typos?

I understand, and I agree, although I’m reading all the replies are already becoming wall of text so I’ll skip parts but I have read them and they’re all interesting.

I’ve landed on Night.

That looks interesting, although I would be weary of learning a layout that only works on specific keyboards, it will make it hard for you to use a laptop on the go, work in an office with a normal keyboard or any other similar situation.

Furthermore, how bad did things become?

I think it’s easier if I answer this first. At the worst I had problems holding heavy stuff in my hand, as in fingers lackesld strength or didn’t respond properly. And for my lower back at the worst it was constant pain where I needed to lay down with a pillow on my lumbar to stretch. After fixing those I became very aware of the initial feelings, such as numbness or feeling pain when stretching (which btw I strongly recommend you check out wrist and finger stretching exercises as they help a lot). Lots of the changes I made (e.g. split ortholinear keyboard) were probably not needed, but the wrist pain that kickstarted everything got me worry enough that I don’t want to take any chances.

After a couple of hours, I do experience strange sensations that border on pain. Furthermore, there’s (almost) always some level of unease/discomfort. Thankfully, resting continues to feel good and I get especially revitalized after sleeping well. But I acknowledge that this isn’t sustainable.

It’s not, those are exactly the early signals that you asked me about, you think that because you’re able to rest and stretch and it goes away that it’s all fine, but it will require ever more stretching and resting until they don’t go away ever. At least that’s what happened to me, at the beginning I would stretch my wrist and fingers and rest for a while and be fine, eventually that became next day I’ll be fine, then over the weekend, then never.

Wrist pain and fingers that feel wacky. So, this is basically carpal tunnel 101.

That’s exactly what I had, although mine was never actually diagnosed, but I had all of the symptoms and my dad had to do the surgery so I have family history. It does get better if you adjust, I don’t feel any of the symptoms I once did, and it is sustainable I haven’t had any symptoms in about 10 years since I switched to a more keyboard centric flow and the layout, so putting in the work does help out. I should say I had 24 years when the symptoms first appeared, so it was kindof young which was one of the reasons I got very scared about getting those symptoms so early.

org-mode seems to be Emacs’ forte.

Org-mode is absolutely wonderful, I haven’t tried any replacement because the reason I abandoned org-mode wasn’t emacs related, I kept using emacs for org-mode for a while after I dropped it as my main editor. The reason is that there’s no compatibility with other editors or apps. Everything uses markdown, and for most basic stuff markdown is good enough. I do miss habit tracking, task management, table calculations and other neat stuff, but the commodity of using the same format for everything and that other people use it as well outweighs all of that for me.

Yup, just drop the markdown files in the folder where Silverbullet stores the markdown files and they’re accessible. BTW the format to reference a file is [[path/to/file]] and you can reference inexistent files and they will get created when you navigate to them.

I used to do that, but eventually found out about https://silverbullet.md/ it’s still just markdown files but I can edit them on the go with my phone.

Plus it has some nice extra syntax to query documents that’s quite handy.

Curious to see this at the very top of your list. Perhaps I should make my switch to Sway rather sooner than later. Thank you for the endorsement!

For me it was a lot off wrist pain, so switching to a more keyboard centric way of interacting with the WM was very impactful.

I intend to learn this with the alt keyboard layout after the more ergonomic split keyboard has arrived. Wish me good luck 😉!

Which alternate layout are you considering? I recommend grabbing something you typed and feeding it here to check heat map of keypresses you would have done to have some visual representation of your usage.

So I suppose that by effectively removing most need for a mouse, the switch to a trackball has been less impactful.

Bingo, I actually switched to trackball before going to keyboard centric WM, but after it I’ve even gone back to mouse a few times feeling almost no difference, because I end up using the mouse a lot less.

Btw, perhaps related, would you happen to be aware of hints? If so, could you touch upon its relevance?

I have, not exactly it but similar stuff, I used to use a browser called conkeror that had emacs key bindings, and have tried to learn a very similar system to hints in the past. Honestly, when I has lots of wrist pain they were useful to completely remove the need of a mouse, but they’re clunky and not as efficient as a pointer so I tend not to use them.

Curious. Is this a special ergonomic chair (or something)?

Nope, just a Secret Lab Titan Evo, but any good chair would do, I spent a year with a cheap Amazon chair and had lots of back pain.

Did you advance/progress in increments because you were testing out the latest addition to the setup? And thus, only introduced a subsequent change after judging that you were not ‘done’ yet?

It was more of a gradual thing, I had wrist pain, so I switched to a trackball, that helped but didn’t got rid of it. So I tried AwesomeWM, found Conkeror and slowly the pain started to fade away and I dove deep into the keyboard centric thing learning touch typing and Colemak. Eventually other issues came on, like pinky strain from Emacs, or a different kind of wrist pain from a small keyboard that made me switch to a split one, or back pain that made me invest in a good chair. I don’t think my setup is “done”, it adapts to whatever my body is asking, but I’ve started to listen carefully and switch stuff on the early signals because that first wrist pain was an eye opener on how bad things can get if you ignore them.

I am so glad to read this! While the journey until I am able to interact with my systems without any pain seems far away right now, success stories like yours make me so pumped to pull through.

Do you feel pain now though? If so what? You should address that immediately. At most points I would have answered that I felt no pain with my setup, because those things build up gradually, if you’re at the point of feeling pain the time to take action is now.

About the emacs plugins, yeah, by the name I can tell you those do the same to the ones I cited, my point is that the plugin ecosystem for it might be a bit less extensive, and not sure how to set shortcuts that use vim key bindings for other plugins.

I would only try out Emacs or Neovim through a opinionated config.

Why? Having had an emacs config that I copied from somewhere and ended up growing and becoming something unmanageable, I’m have a very strong opinion that one should build your own config files from scratch to know them. Presets are good if you’re going to be using them bare, but if you’re going to customize them they can get in the way. And that’s another point for Nvim for me, their configs are very easy, I followed this guide and had a working config that I could easily expand in no time.

org-mode FTW

Ah, I miss org-mode, it’s too bad the world went with Markdown instead.

Granted, I’m still very much enjoying Emacs. But, I shouldn’t disregard/dismiss Neovim any longer. It’s time to revisit this rabbit hole 😂.

Meh, maybe, maybe not, Emacs is great, I just never would have gone with evil mode, it sort of feels like it defeats the purpose of both emacs and vim in my mind for some reason. It’s like if someone told you they put a Ford engine on their Chevrolet, it feels convoluted and strange to think on that solution before thinking of using a Ford.

No, there are other ways to get access to your machine without needing it. In general you can classify vulnerabilities as either code execution or privilege escalation, a code execution vulnerability allows an attacker to execute code on your machine, a privilege escalation allows him to break barriers that you might have imposed on him.

For example, if you’re running service X as root, and someone manages to find a way to use something on service X to execute code, they might get a reverse shell to your box and run anything there. So you might set service X to run as your user instead of root, now that vulnerability is less important because it only compromises your user, but the attacker could use this one in conjunction with the other one to gain control of your user, then escalate to become root.

If this is something you’re interested in, there’s a cool website called hackthebox where you have to do these sort of things for real. If you want to have an idea on how it looks, there are some excellent videos here showing walkthroughs for many of them he boxes, I recommend checking something labeled easy since these boxes can get quite complex, but it will give you a good idea of the steps attackers need to take to compromise your system

Came here for the wallpaper, saved this reply for the link. I had considered running my own server a while back to be able to play again.