User:0xMrRobot

/bin/whoami

I'm a Brasiliam student of Control and Automation Engineering, born in 2003. My Linux journey started with Kubuntu in 2021, from there I switched to Debian in 2022, and finally landed on Arch in 2024.

This page is essentially a repository of the things I do on Arch (i.e. my personal setups, interesting things I come across in the Linux world, etc...). Feel free to read, scrutinize, share and help improve the contents here :)

Where I can be found

GitHub

Reddit

My personal setups

In this session I keep documentation for my personal Arch Linux setups - mainly for my future self, in case he eventually needs to reload his systems.

Contributions are always welcome, and if I'm wrong about something I'd very much appreciate to be corrected.

Note As much as I intend to make this documentation as informative as possible, at the end of the day, these are my personal setups. So, unless you have exactly the same hardware and want to have exactly the same system as me, at some point you will have to do some things differently, and I encourage you to do so! The beauty of Arch Linux is to build your system exactly how you want it to be, creating an amazing computing experience.

Warning These articles should never replace the relevant articles of the ArchWiki. If they differ in some topic, the ArchWiki is very likely the correct version. Also, if you decide to follow the things I do, bear in mind that what's described here might be out-of-date (although I will sometimes update these articles when I do or learn something new). Always check the date the article was last updated, it's displayed at the bottom left of the page.
The things listed here work for me, on my systems. Therefore, I'm not responsible if they don't work for you, in your circumstances.

Alienware m16 R1

General tips and tricks

Document your changes/configurations!

This is the most important tip here. I can't stress it enough.

Whenever you change your system by creating/editing configuration files, write comments explaining what you just did and why, and ideally include the links to the places where you got the information you're using from.

That way, not only it will be easier to maintain your system functional, but you also make it easier for others to help you whenever you ask for assistance online.

Right now you might know exactly why you just did what you did, you won't remember it forever. Help yourself in keeping your Arch setup working.

Tip Another good idea is to always include a "default string" in every file that you edited, e.g. "Edited by Mr. Robot". This way, the edited files can be easily found with grep(1) and similar tools.

RTFM

This one might seem obvious, but it doesn't hurt to remind.

ArchWiki (the resource you're using right now)

The ArchWiki is beautifully well-written and, almost always, it'll have the solution for the problem you want to solve. It should be the first place to search for help.

Manual Pages

Next come the manual pages. These are much more in depth, sometimes being ridiculously large (e.g. ffmpeg(1)). However, most likely you will never encounter a situation where there isn't a solution for your problem. If this happens, the manual page is probably out-of-date and a newer version is available somewhere online (on Arch this shouldn't happen).

The man command can be used to access the manual page of almost all commands right from the terminal. You can install i.e. man-db and man-pages to have access to them locally. You can even install manual pages for your own language (e.g. man-pages-pt_br). They are also available online (for example, here).

Tip The default viewer for manual pages is less. However, you can easily change it to whatever text viewer/editor you prefer by setting the MANPAGER environment variable:

$ export MANPAGER="nvim +Man!"

You can also make this change persistent by adding this command to your shell's configuration file (i.e. .bashrc).

tldr command

TL;DR stands for "too long; didn't read". In the Linux world, it's also used to refer to small lists of the most common use cases for different commands.

These lists are community-made, and the main project can be found here. All you need to do is install one of the several variants available, I personally use tealdeer.

The usage is identical to man:

$ tldr command

It uses a local cache for offline usage. To update this cache, type:

$ tldr --update