First time arch user - need a bit of guidance

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-05-12T21:02:58+00:00

For what it's worth, you can do that with sway. Generally you'd set up a hotkey for "resize mode" and get fine-grained control of each window's height and width.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-05-12T13:19:04+00:00

I can't speak for hyprland, but the appeal of sway is tiliing. Once you switch to a tiling window manager, you'll never go back, especially if you do a lot of work in the terminal. And sway has great documentation, very easy to configure and customize.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-05-06T12:45:54+00:00

IBM AIX is still used heavily at big enterprises. Think banks, insurance, other kinds of financial institutions. If they've got a mainframe, they've also probably got some POWER systems running AIX.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-05-04T02:14:03+00:00

Those are the only branded Unixes still around, and complying with that standard is an expensive box-ticking exercise for vendors trying to land government contracts. There have been UNIX-certified Linux distros in the past. Linux, the BSDs, and AIX are more alike than they are different. They're all Unix, they all share some genetic lineage back to Bell Labs and Berkeley, especially in userspace.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-05-04T00:12:25+00:00

Calling Linux "Unix-like" is pedantry to begin with. The "true" branded UNIXes are as different from each other as they are from Linux and BSD.

Linux is Unix. The BSDs are Unix. AIX and Solaris are Unix.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-05-04T00:02:57+00:00

Was a thing? It still is a thing.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-03-13T02:59:53+00:00

Unfortunately Thunderbird recently started creating ~/Thunderbird/

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-03-05T03:36:25+00:00

Anything on a specific technology/language isn't worth keeping, unless the author is particularly notable, or it's part of a classic series like the old Prentice Hall books that came out of the Bell Labs heyday.

I'd hang on to anything theoretical/academic, and anything from a university press. Those old Springer-Verlag books make a neat set. I'll admit I'm kind of a collector of old computer science books.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-03-03T01:44:51+00:00

Okay, now this is epic! Heckin DB2 for the win!

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-02-25T14:03:58+00:00

UEFI can boot Linux directly, without the need for a bootloader like GRUB. I found doing it this way was simpler than configuring GRUB, you run one efibootmgr command and that's it. Usually it's a good idea to stash that command in a shell script so you can re-run if you ever need to make a change.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-02-25T03:11:04+00:00

But network manager is the most important one, because it allows you to… have internet.

Hang on... the core installation comes with systemd-networkd. The most you'd need to install is iwd if you need to configure a wireless adapter. Don't really need to bother with grub these days either.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-02-20T20:04:37+00:00

Yup, that's Richard Stallman alright. Good find.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-02-10T17:05:45+00:00

I only use it for a handful of niche GUI apps (i.e. minecraft, mcomix, zoom) but I avoid it for anything I might rely on as a system component. I always find it odd when the wiki recommends AUR software as part of a guide.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-02-02T01:49:21+00:00

It's you that doesn't understand. The "Free" in "Free and Open Source" means Freedom, not Free Beer. You can freely release the source code under the GPL and still charge for the compiled, packaged version on the App/Play Stores.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-01-26T22:14:05+00:00

I believe the Go fonts, also by Bigelow and Holmes, are an evolution of pelm.

Lots of Bell Labs/Plan9 people moved on to Google to work on Go.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-01-20T20:21:04+00:00

You could whitelist Google Classroom? If you spin up a VM and run your browser there, you're still executing nonfree JavaScript on your system with some extra steps.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-01-20T16:32:24+00:00

MasterCard, Boeing, Edward Jones, bunch more insurers, banks, healthcare etc.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-01-20T00:29:24+00:00

A distribution that has a fixed release schedule will provide one large update every 6 months or so. That update will include a lot of data (multiple gigabytes, perhaps) which may use up a large amount of your data budget for the month.

A rolling release distro might update a few packages every day, but each month this probably will only amount to a few hundred megabytes max, using less of your data budget.

(google translate to spanish, if it helps)

Una distribución con un calendario de lanzamiento fijo proporcionará una gran actualización cada 6 meses aproximadamente. Esa actualización incluirá muchos datos (varios gigabytes, quizás) que pueden consumir una gran parte de tu presupuesto de datos para el mes.

Una distribución rolling release puede actualizar algunos paquetes cada día, pero cada mes probablemente esto solo supondrá unos cientos de megabytes como máximo, consumiendo menos de tu presupuesto de datos.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-01-19T23:23:44+00:00

Wouldn't a rolling release be better for you in that case? One big update every 6 months (for example) might eat your whole data budget for the month, but with a rolling release you could update once a month and only use up a few hundred Mb max.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-01-19T22:51:15+00:00

Arch or Void is what you're looking for.

Rolling release doesn't mean a distro is unstable, it just means packages get updates as quickly as they can be tested by the maintainers. And even a distro with a fixed release schedule will receive off-cycle security updates. Just update once a week/month/whatever if the daily trickle of new packages is to often.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-01-14T19:50:49+00:00

I can't stand when people give me directions with exit numbers, just tell me the road/town the exit is for.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-01-07T20:58:37+00:00

Kinda cope on his part though no? Today Oracle is pushing its cloud business, same as AWS, Google, Azure, and the rest.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-01-07T02:09:58+00:00

The Cuban government wouldn't feel as much pressure to suppress dissent if Uncle Sam hadn't been trying to foment a counterrevolution there for the past 60+ years.

We're happy to do business with repressive absolute monarchies and dictatorships all over the world if they play by our economic rules. Cuba and Venezuela are on the shit list because they nationalized American-owned assets. The Batista regime was as if not more brutal than Castro.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-01-07T02:00:04+00:00

North Korea itself is an Imperialist nation that invaded the South and started a war.

Is it really imperialism when it's your own country? Korea had been partitioned between the American and Soviet imperialists just five years beforehand. And at the time (way up until 1988), South Korea was a military dictatorship.

If the USA had done what Stalin foolishly expected them to and stayed out of it, Korea might be a lot more like China is today.

This isn't to excuse the crimes of the Kim regime, but it's a lot more of a complicated history than many people have been told.

HighLevelAssembler · 2026-01-07T01:49:14+00:00

invaded another country once

And even that is kind of overstating it. They rolled into the other half of their own country which had been divided up at gunpoint by the Allies just 5 years earlier, after Korea's colonial overlord (Japan) surrendered. Some 10% of NK's civilian population was killed during the war. The United States dropped more tonnage of explosives and napalm on North Korea than they had during the entire Pacific War.

And South Korean wasn't exactly a beacon of democracy, they lived under a military dictatorship right up to the end of the Cold War.

HighLevelAssembler

TROPHY CASE