Astaroth @ Astaroth @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Arch is made out to be a lot harder and unstable than it really is. And AUR is a great resource but realistically you won't even use it that much. At least I haven't. I used it for Brave Browser package before switching to Firefox, some WINE gst plugin, and some other small stuff I don't remember.

Also keep in mind even if it's a AUR package, you can just install the package like normal if it's a binary (it will be named with a -bin at the end, like brave-bin), so just because you're using some packages from AUR it doesn't mean you have to build lots of packages from source every time you update.

 

People hear scary stuff about some random update breaking the system but it's exaggerated.

You definitely can break stuff with user error and sometimes if you're not paying attention while updating you can get problems (combination of bad defaults + user error).

Main problem is that you can do whatever you want, but you might not actually know what you really want to do or you might not be doing what you meant to do, and Arch Linux will let you do it even if something breaks due to it.

And well that's going to be same regardless of OS but it's more accessible on Arch.

 

However you shouldn't be too worried about it, in the basically worst case scenario you might need a Live USB and another device with an internet connection to look up and what you need to do to fix what's wrong, but you can always count on that there's a fix.

Most other OSes if you have a problem, depending on what it is you might just be stuck with it.

 

Biggest noob mistake I recall doing was that I had my old windows hard drive as extra storage and slowly moving stuff over once in a while, so I hadn't reformatted it and I also wasn't aware of that the default Linux NTFS driver wasn't very good and that I should've gotten NTFS-3G if I weren't going to reformat.

Well one day while not paying attention while updating my system through pacman (yay actually) I was also copying files from my old windows hard drive and I didn't even look before just pressing accept on some AUR package rebuild.

Well it turns out that package was formerly part of Extra repository and thus it used to be a binary package, but now since it was moved to the AUR and it didn't have -bin it was changed to a package to be built from source, and if I were to continue using it I should've changed which package.

But I just hit accept and it started chugging away, and it needed more RAM that I have and apparently there's no safe guard for this (at least not by default) and by the time I noticed that my RAM usage was getting to high the system already got too sluggish and I was too late to end the process.

I also didn't know about SysRq at the time so the only option I knew was to force shut down by holding down the power button for 5 seconds.

 

My actual system was still fine and all but my old windows hard drive that was transferring files got borked. It wasn't completely bricked so I eventually salvaged it and it's since been reformatted too, but I thought I had bricked it at the time.

 

Well that might still seem a bit scary but that was me making several user errors in a row, and at the end of the day it still wasn't even a big problem.

I got through another few missions of Wargroove 2. It continues to be a worthy successor to Wargroove.

I didn't have high hopes for WG2 at first but I saw they made some really good improvements with the map editor.

I'm still on the fence about buying it though, I heard it doesn't have ranked match making so if I get it it would only be for the single player. Might get it if it goes on steam sale

I mean I use DDG as default search engine in Firefox and Google Search isn't much better now, but google search isn't even a 10th as good as it used to be 10 years ago.

Thank you for the correction. It was 2 years ago + I was really inexperienced so I could be misremembering things and/or just have been doing things incorrectly

Disclaimer: I only tried NixOS for less than a month when I was a complete Linux noob, I have since then been daily driving Arch Linux for about 2 years now.

 

For me, at least on the surface level, NixOS just felt like Arch Linux, with more similarities than differences.

What was nice about NixOS was the single config file for everything, although iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.

Edit: I either remembered it wrong or I was doing it wrong because you don't have to reboot the whole system according to the reply from hallettj.

 

What I didn't like however was all the packages that got installed (through the list in the config file) had really strange directories which I couldn't find easily.

like on Arch the packages and the executables are basically all at /usr/lib/ and /usr/bin/ and iirc it was pretty much the same on NixOS, except on Arch I'll have usr/lib/firefox but on nix it would be usr/lib/u123uadqasd782341kasjhiu3sh932s9sdasdsapzxcqw-firefox

 

Another thing is that it works great for everything you install through the Nix config file, but it's not necessarily going to clean up any files created by programs that got installed through it when you remove the packages from the config file.

Like say you have installed steam and then you install some game through steam, well that game wasn't added through the config file so there's no guarantee that if you decide to remove steam that you will also remove whatever the programs steam installed or if they created some new files somewhere.

 

Of course the same thing already happens on other OSes as well, so you could say that it's an upside that Nix is better at cleaning up after itself whenever you remove something, but also because it's supposed to all be controlled through a single config it just feels that much worse when you have to hunt down some file somewhere.

 

Again these are mostly my anecdotes from 2 years ago when I was a complete noob. Maybe I wouldn't have any issues if I tried it today. And chances are I was just trying to do something you shouldn't even be doing.

Plus at the start I used KDE Plasma 5 on Nix and Arch, maybe it will go better if I use i3wm on NixOS like I've been doing for a year and half or so on Arch now.

 

At least I'm pretty sure that having daily driven Arch for 2 years now I would have much better chances with NixOS now than when I tried it with 0 experience on Linux.

So since you've already got the experience from using EndeavorOS you might not have any big problems using NixOS, or at least learn how it works pretty fast.

(I also use Google when I need a word definition - I like the layout and ability to see synonyms quickly.)

yeah that's one thing I really miss from when I had google as default search engine, typing word/phrase + define and actually getting a useful result. DDGs version is barely even helpful at all

Google Search is way worse than it used to but still beats DDG by a mile.

I've tried SearX and it was meh, maybe there's some better instance than the one I tried though.

Yandex is good for reverse image search and when the American government makes western search engines block certain search results, but not that useful in general. Also for a period Yandex just kept bombarding me with endless captchas and was completely unusuable

Bing search is just DDG, or well DDG is just Bing.

Baidu search, tbh haven't tried it much, but even for chinese I had better search results on google search so yeah

Guess what I found in /home/{user}/.wine/drive_c/users/{user}/Temp, 10GB of log files. Although 9GB was from one time when I used Cheat Engine and I don't know what really happened tbh besides it causing a OOM crash.

It created a 9GB sized file called ADDRESSES.TMP, I never considered checking for temp files in .wine before. And I guess I should be checking all the prefixes created by Steam games as well...

Disclaimer: my experience is only with Arch Linux (daily drive for 2 years) and a little bit of Linux Mint on a relative's PC.

For me I found it more tedious to get games working through WINE on Linux Mint compared to on Arch Linux, some packages I wanted seemingly don't exist in the apt repositories (wine mono and wine gecko) and had to be manually installed.

I also had some trouble because the package names were different compared to on pacman, especially the lib32 ones, but to be fair I would probably have had the same issue on Arch if I first used Linux Mint then Arch so not having the same package names isn't inherently a fault of Linux Mint.

 

But it wasn't that it wasn't doable, it was just more tedious, and to be fair daily driving Arch for 2 years compared to using Linux Mint every once in a while means I'm way less familiar with Linux Mint.

Eclipse Vanguard 💀

Do you use workspaces on Windows?

Tbh I didn't know that's a thing

How does it compare to PollyMC? It was super easy to use and you can play both offline without an account but also online with a Mojang Account. (Java versions)

Admittedly I didn't actually try to play it online since I just looked it up for a nephew.

I used the Linux AppImage, just download and run it and you're good (might have to install new java runtime depending on what you have already), but there's also Windows and Mac versions.

 

p.s. I'm not really into Minecraft and don't know what's up, but apparently there's some drama or something and PollyMC (with 2 'L's) is not to be confused with PolyMC (one 'L').

I legitimately didn’t know it removed features and until reading the other reply and watching the linked videos I wasn’t aware of a lot of the changes or even the existence of features like rejoining matches. If I ever got disconnected from a match I just played something else even back in the day. I don’t remember ever having an option to rejoin a match, unless that’s specifically a ladder games thing. I don’t recall getting disconnected from many games though, but I know it did happen. Definitely not enough for me to have been upset about it.

Warcraft 3 itself never had rejoin as in you could not close WC3 start it up again login and rejoin, but if you were having connection issues it would pause the game and wait a minute or so to give you a chance to reconnect before dropping you.

Some private WC3 servers did a have better reconnection features added, like ENTConnect, but obviously those were obviously just for games hosted by their own bots (although you could still join these games from official battle.net lobby search until Blizzard nuked host botting a year or so before Reforged came out)

 

But if you get Desynced there's no waiting for reconnection, you're just dropped.

Because being Desynced means the game state on your client doesn't match with the rest of the players, so to fix that the game would have to be rewinded until before the desync happened and no such feature existed in WC3.

And the patches leading up to reforged and Reforged itself added a ton of desync issues.

 

I’m assuming that’s what you’re referring to by missing network features because it still has multiplayer and I’m pretty sure it still has the chat lobbies although I never really used those back then and I don’t use them now either.

LAN doesn't exist. Ranked Ladder & profiles didn't exist until 2022, and it still sucks and everyone uses W3Champions instead anyway, and the auto hosted in game tournaments don't exist.

 

As far as me saying the custom games were improved I’d say you’re the dishonest one if you’re saying that’s not the case. They definitely improved custom games and while I don’t know all the changes, an easy one to point out would be the saved ranking system that exists for line tower wars now. That definitely didn’t exist back in the day.

Regarding custom games, the custom games are not made by Blizzard, they're made by players. However in the patches leading up to Reforged Blizzard did add a lot of new functions that modders/map makers could use which were great additions, thus allowing for new cool stuff in custom games.

One super obvious and huge change was that in version 1.30 24 player support was added, instead of the usual 12.

But that doesn't change that Blizzard then also made changes in Reforged that broke basically every existing custom map and they had to be updated to fix.

 

There were some desync issues and saving games in single player was broken but for custom games version 1.31.1 (the last patch before Reforged) was the best patch, you had all the new functionality added to the map editor but a lot less bugs and problems from Reforged.

Also there still haven't even added the ability to play custom campaigns to Reforged lol. The few single player campaigns you can play in Reforged are thanks to people independent of Blizzard coming up with a work around and they're technically just a series of custom games you play (although that is what campaigns are so).

yes

Warcraft 3, Age Series (AoE, AoE2, AoM, AoE3), Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005)

I played the first age of empires when I was 6 or 7 y/o and I've played all of the games besides AoE4 (including Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds).

As a kid we had few crappy dell computers connected to just a hub (LAN without internet) and would play a lot of Age of Empires 2 and C&C Red Alert 1 & 2 multiplayer.

Age of Empires and Red Alert were also games I would frequently play at small LAN parties (although everyone was really bad)

 

I played a bit of online AoE2 when AoE2 HD came out on steam but it was pretty bad so I stopped playing it. When DE came out I started watching AoE2 content but I'll never play it because I've come to greatly dislike Microsoft over the years.

 

I've replayed Need for Speed Most Wanted (and also Carbon) tens of times over the years, and I still play it every now and then (with mods now)

 

But the game I've played the most is probably Warcraft 3. I've played a ton of custom games on Battle.net (RIP) and it's what got me a bit into programming since I liked making custom maps and making triggers eventually led me to learn JASS (Just Another Scripting Language)

If Blizzard didn't completely ruin Warcraft 3 with WC3 Reforged Refunded I'd probably still be playing it and making custom maps every so often.

I have played a bit on private servers but it's just not the same anymore.

 

There's a pretty cool Warcraft 3 open source project called Warsmash though so maybe one day I'll start playing again.

Already saw this a year or two ago, it's a great watch and would highly recommend anyone who hasn't seen it yet does watch it

re: Skyrim, could just be that some SKSE mod you're using needs some newer .net runtime or similar

could also be not enough vram (even if you have enough ram wine/proton could have it's vram allowance set too low)

 

If you don't already have one get a crashlogger, for SkyrimSE 1.5.97 I would recommend .NET Script Framework (and use SSE Engine Fixes skse64 preloader instead of DLL Plugin Loader)

 

If you already knew about all this and still having issues then don't mind me

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Not the Skywalker Saga)

Clone Wars is also really good, plus it has a lot better split screen which is great for 2p coop playing with your kid/nephew/niece or just being able to have 2 children play together instead of fighting over who gets to play and who has to wait for their turn that never comes

Arch Linux with i3wm

Fish, Alacritty, Rofi (dmenu replacement)

End of Windows 7