User:Jl2
Hi! this is my user page.
About me
General
- I like to: biking, tennis, baking+cooking, doing some hacky stuff and listening to music
- I don't like: spinach, some tough sports (e.g. jogging), Broken Windows OS
- My favourite food: Lasagne
- The music I listen to: Metal, occasionally phonk
Setup
- Machine: lenovo yoga 7 gen 7 (Laptop; AMD ryzen 7 6800u; 16 GB; 2.2K@60 14' IPS)
- OS: dualboot windows and Linux
- DE: sway
- DM: greetd autologin, but with swaylock for authentication (see below)
- Bootloader: systemd-boot with UKI images
Uptime/Contact
I Live near Zurich, so my time zone is CEST.
My uptime is between 6:30 and 8:30.
- Email: janluca.oster@proton.me - Is up in the Morning when I didn't use up my screen time yet or if I occasionally look from my laptop.
- IRC: you can occasionally find me under 'jl2' in the #AOT chat. mostly in the Afternoon.
- I'm not sure but I guess you can write to me in the 'Discussion' Tab.
Stuff I think you need to know
Is Arch for you?
Easy answer: NO. it just the right distro for most Users.
You may want to install Arch for these reasons:
- customizeability: Arch is one of the most customizeable distro. Arch also doesn't have a default face like other distros for this reason.
- rolling release: It has the fastest package distribution. Once a package has been updated, it is distributed.
- No versions: It does not have a release cycle. theoretically Arch is still on v1.0 :)
- Small update batches
- the hacky feeling of being able to say you run Arch ;)
and you must be willing to take these drawbacks:
- Installing and configuring from the command line (Archinstall is for pussies, You don't know what that script changes/preconfigures). Be prepared to tune your system for hours after installing. Almost every other distro avoids this (Garuda is preconfigured nifty-looking Arch).
- Breaks: Updates have a chance of breaking stuff. Use Ubuntu if you want a stable update system.
Great Stuff you need to Install
General
- sway: great tiler
- ulauncher: fast+good looking
- mako: notification daemon
- swaylock: nifty lock screen
- swaybar: default
- Firefox: A good, secure and feature-rich browser
- micro: great terminal text editor. better than nano
- paru: easy AUR management with PKGBUILD editor (see below)
- cpupower: CPU frequency scaling done easy for scripting
Creative
- Blender: free 3D creator. occasionnally crashes.
- hip-runtime-amd: gpu rendering support, but breaks every couple of months
- GIMP: powerfull image manipulator
- kdenlive: average video editor
Communications
- Thunderbird: configureable mail client
- Srain: still horribly buggy IRC client and configuring it is a pain, but doesn't look like windows 98 and it's easy to use.
Other
- gnome-keyring + seahorse: simple set-up password storage.
- EarlyOOM: a good, lightweight OOM killer
Zram vs Zswap
- Zswap: compressed swap. needs a swap partition. always use this with a swap partition/file.
- Zram: dynamic compressed swap in the Ramdisk. It only compresses RAM if it's low, so having it enabled even if you don't use it doesn't bother. Don't forget to disable Zswap when using this!
if we assume to have a compression level of 1:3:
| RAM | swap size/Zram disksize | total/uncompressed | total/compressed | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zswap | 16GB | 10GB | 26GB | 46GB |
| Zram | 16GB | 16GB | 16GB | 48GB |
So Zram is equivallent to 10GB of Swap (generally 2/3 of RAM) here.
Plus, Zram is faster than Zswap because writing things to disk is still slower than writing to RAM.
But normally, you don't need more than 8GB anyway, so mostly you don't need to compress anything except for the peaks. Depending how often you reach these, consider using a OOM killer (I recommend EarlyOOM).
Partitioning
- As seen above, you may or may not need a swap partition.
- /home is useless except if you often reinstall your OS.
- the EFI partition does not need to be big. 250MB is mostly enough. If you want to minimize the size, then use UKI images and mount the EFI to /efi.
- pereferably do not make too many small partitions. It's inefficient.
File systems
- do not use BTRFS if you don't use the features. I'll probably add a backup section sometime.
- ext4: generally good, has good features and low-level kernel support.
- xfs: great performance and performance features.
Sway
A application list can be obtained from the sway github page
Notification daemon
Install a notification daemon e.g. mako.
Add the line exec mako in your sway config.
custom statusbar
Write a script that outputs the info in one line.
for colored output, add the line
bar {
...
pango_markup enabled
...
}
and add this function to your script:
## Availible Color shemes
Red=#FF0000
Green=#00FF00
BrownOrange=#FFDD00
Cyan=#00FFDD
colorize () {
echo "{<}span foreground='$1'>$2{<}/span>"
}
Ignore the brackets around {<}. didn't know how to format it.
to change the font, add this option to your sway config:
bar {
...
font pango:DejaVu sans 10.5
...
}
Screenshots
Install grimshot and add these lines to your config:
bindsym Print exec grimshot copy area bindsym Control+Print copy active
optionally add the --notify switch.
Screen
Align screens
install wdisplay. It is a Graphical manager as seen on DEs. see https://man.archlinux.org/man/sway-output.5.en to implement it in the configs.
See below to Auto-run it automatically on plugin/plugout.
Auto-Implement Alignment
Usefull for laptops that often plug in to other screens.
Install kanshi and add the exec kanshi line to your config. Also remove any Output * lines, as these can be configured below.
Edit .config/kanshi/config as following:
profile {
output interface config
}
profile {
output interface config
output other_interface config
}
kanshi will pick a profile if all outputs are pressent from top to bottom.
Replace Builtin/monitor with the output of swaymsg -t get_outputs. both the model name(e.g. 'AU Optronics 0xA195 Unknown') or the interface (e.g. HDMI-A-1) can be used. First is usefull to define an option for a specific screen.
output HDMI-A-1 enable output eDP-1 resolution 1920x1080@60Hz position 3440,760
see https://man.archlinux.org/man/sway-output.5.en for more config options.
To test the Settings before setting, see Align Screens above.
Screen mirroring
Install wl-mirror and run it with wl-mirror screen_to_be_mirrored
Then move the window to the workspace of the external screen.
Get rid of a graphical DM but keep a passsword
DMs are pretty slow and aren't that usefull. So we can "Skip" them; also the sway lock screen does look funky.
Note though that you will break any wallets that auto-unlock on login.
Create the file .config/sway/autologin and add these lines:
include .config/sway/config exec swaylock
Install greetd (or a other autologin method) and append these lines:
[initial_session] command = "sway --config /home/username/.config/sway/autologin" user = "username"
and edit the command line under [session]:
command = "agreety --cmd sway"
to auto-relogin to sway, but without the swaylock.
Pacman/Paru
ILoveCandy
Get the nice PacMan progress bars as seen in Garuda linux.
Just add ILoveCandy to /etc/pacman.conf
Parallel Downloads
Significantly increases Download times for small packages:
Uncomment the relevant line in /etc/pacman.conf
Downgrading
Install downgrade from the AUR.
AUR
Chaotic-AUR
Tons of precompiled packages. Saves you hours of compiling time. To install:
pacman-key --recv-key FBA220DFC880C036 --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com pacman-key --lsign-key FBA220DFC880C036 pacman -U 'https://cdn-mirror.chaotic.cx/chaotic-aur/chaotic-keyring.pkg.tar.zst' 'https://cdn-mirror.chaotic.cx/chaotic-aur/chaotic-mirrorlist.pkg.tar.zst'
and append this to /etc/pacman.conf:
[chaotic-aur] Include = /etc/pacman.d/chaotic-mirrorlist
Paru
Your automated AUR manager for the rest of the AUR packages. Exists in the Chaotic-AUR repo.
(soon) 10 Billion ways to break windows
- waiting a while
- doing nothing
- hard reboot
- Not cleanly unmounting the ntfs partition
- pressing the power button for a while
- editing the partition layout
Funny things
Videos
Broken keyboard
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=286321