it’s somewhat vibe coded but the one i probably use the most is this one to swap between speakers and headset. the device name to look for is just put directly in there, it’d take some adjustment to run it on different machines. this is in my .bashrc:

# switch sinks
toggle_audio() {
  # Find headset sink ID dynamically
  headset_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "Plantronics" | awk '{print $1}')
  
  # Find speakers sink ID dynamically
  speakers_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "pci-0000_05_00.6" | awk '{print $1}')
  
  # Get current default sink
  current_sink=$(pactl get-default-sink)
  
  # Get current sink ID
  current_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "$current_sink" | awk '{print $1}')
  
  # Toggle between the two
  if [ "$current_id" = "$headset_id" ]; then
    pactl set-default-sink "$speakers_id"
    echo "Switched to speakers (Sink $speakers_id)"
  else
    pactl set-default-sink "$headset_id"
    echo "Switched to headset (Sink $headset_id)"
  fi
}

generally i try not to use too many custom things because for work i regularly work on all kinds of different servers and i’ve just been too lazy to set up some solution to keep it all in sync. someday…

the cursor locking still happens in a handful of games for me - most work perfectly fine but sometimes i do end up running something with gamescope with the --force-grab-cursor argument to fix it.

this is when running games with either steam or wine/bottles/lutris.

strange that it happens in virualbox, i would think it “virtualizing” an entire display would fix issues like that. does virtualbox itself “grab” the cursor, or allow it to go off the screen by default? sorry i don’t really know virtualbox, never used it much

Plenty of distros do package closed source software that does who knows what. i wouldn’t worry about it for now. if you are on a distro that takes a hardline stance on privacy, it was probably gone a while ago, but i don’t actually know any such distros right now.

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luckily i can wipe my work laptop and install linux (for now, there are discussions about not letting unmanaged devices on the network at some point…), but what annoys me is seeing how much tax money we send straight to microsoft. i work in the education sector in europe and the majority of the company’s funds comes from the government, to send millions of that straight to the US, especially with the politics going on right now, seems like a horrible idea. and SO many others are doing the same thing, i swear if we invested just 10% of it into FOSS the world would be a better place already and we’d all save money.

well you can never be 100% certain your laptop won’t spontaneously die either.

for any new arch user, i do recommend keeping an archiso live USB around in case something really does happen - since every arch user should know the basics of how it works, it should be easy enough to recover as well.

knowing that, i really only check the news out of curiosity, since i’m not a grub user i haven’t had arch be unbootable since i started using it years ago. even if it did i’m confident enough it’d be a quick fix.

hard disagree on this… while for people who don’t know it it might look like programming, it’s really not much different than editing config files (which people who don’t know it will assume is programming too).

Sure, the language used by bash can be used to write massive programs. But in 99% cases using the CLI is like using a gui with a button and a text field - type some text into the field and then click the button, letting whatever software you’re running take the content of the text field and do something with it.

way closer, in fact, to executing a discord bot command, than to actual programming as in software development (what i’d argue people think of when talking about programming)

funnily enough, i see it as one of the advantages of arch, and a reason i’ll keep putting up with the constant updating for the forseeable future - nvidia support has gotten way better recently, and since arch has very recent packages i haven’t had nvidia issues in quite a while now.

Once it all lands in debian i’ll consider giving debian another shot on desktop… but that’ll take a while.

while you do have a point, i’m still having issues with taskwarrior printing it’s update notifications, even after opening an issue and the maintainers patching it.

The thing is, i use arch on 3 different devices, and i don’t need to see every news entry 3 times, so yes in my case having it as default in pacman would indeed be bloat.

That said, there is PLENTY of places where I think arch could have saner defaults. but the beauty of arch is that it is made to be configured exactly the way you like it, so you really can’t fault arch as much in this case, compared to other distros that try to take all decisionmaking away from the user.

gammastep works just fine for me on sway, and it appears the maintainer is still replying to issues on that repo. i wouldn’t worry too much just yet.

that said, it seems to not work for hyprland, so for anyone using that, look for something else

i think flatpak has done a lot to make this easier, but at the same time… i’ll admit i’m not a fan of it (mostly due to random issues).

the way i see it, more distros need something like arch linux’ AUR. if an application is reasonably easy to build, it really does not take much to get it into the AUR, from where there’s also a path towards inclusion in the official repos.

i don’t know too much about other distros, but arch really makes it amazingly easy to package software and publish everything needed for others to use it. i feel like linux needs more of this, not less - there’s a great writeup that puts why linux maintainers are important way better than i ever could:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230525163337/https://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/

i’d suggest starting by finding out what package in your distro actually decides where audio goes - mostly it is pulseaudio (older) or pipewire (newer).

depending on the details of how your distro and the dongle work, it could either be a simple “pactl set-default-sink <headset-name>”, or a more complicated set of udev rules or pipewire/wireplumber scripts.

note that distros using pipewire still often support a lot of pactl commands, so it may be worth looking at the simple option even when not using pulseaudio.

just another reason to use tiling window managers ;) at least mine opens my windows in the same workspace on the same output every time, if i configure it to

personally, i’d have pretty big benefits for my homelab if i could use my own ipv6 range for everything. having only a singe public IP is just very limiting.

sadly, my ISP does give out ipv6 for home networks, but i cannot connect to any of them from my mobile phone with the same carrier. so that’s fun. they talked about rolling out ipv6 on mobile networks years ago, but i guess it’ll take a few more…

i bought the tuxedo nano (a mini pc but decently powerful), and its not 100% linux compatible. i imagine its better if you install their own distro (maybe) but running arch linux with the standard kernel on it, i’ve had issues with HPET/TSC (some cpu timekeeping stuff, ruined performance when it happened), the wifi card it came with is known to have issues and i’ve had plenty (usable, but super slow bandwidth depending on what AP i connect to, and no its not the AP all other devices work fine on it), and some lockups when my usb microphone is connected (sometimes it only crashed the usb hub which i could reset).

NONE of these issues are present running arch linux on my old desktop and 2 work laptops. Support wasnt helpful either.

However, its still my main device, i just had to work around these issues.

edit oh, and the fan is not controllable from linux at all, i’ve spent hours trying to find a way. i do not know if it’s controllable from windows either, maybe it’s just the mainboard that doesn’t allow fan control at all outside of the UEFI settings.

using dd for that is outdated info that everyone keeps blindly parroting with zero understanding why. cat is simpler and works fine.

note: both cat and dd only work for this when the image is made in a compatible way, my linux isos always work fine but a windows iso didnt and needs a more specific tool.

The updating issue is something i have to deal with too, its just that the good mirrors constantly change. there’s several tools to automatically update pacman’s mirrorlist, but for some reason i don’t really like any of them ( reflector, rankmirrors/ratemirrors idk, others…)

but with an updated mirrorlist and a pacman config that allows like 5+ parallel downloads (dont ask me why thats not the default, or at least wasnt when i installed) updating is decently fast. until you start using certain packages from the AUR.

use arch btw ;)

mostly kidding, but shit like this is exactly why i love arch so much. set up the entire system from ground up - no bullshit on it, and you know how (almost) every part works and what it does.

it definitely taught me about how linux works, at least the parts that are relevant for most users. starting from a clean install without any kind of gui (or common networking tools) really made me understand all the building blocks modern desktop linux uses. sure, installing a full blown desktop environment skips most things, but going with just a window manager and adding required features package by package really does help with understanding, and if a problem does pop up later you’ll know exactly where to look, instead of having to search super generic terms.

most games have never had flicker issues for me on arch/sway with a rtx2070. Steam itself used to be unusable and last i checked was still a bit glitchy, Discord also sucked, but the games always worked fine.

apart from some issues with recognizing the mouse cursor in a few games.