I’ve been using Arch for about 3 years now myself and shamefully … I do most things without the terminal.

I still use it for a handful of things of course, I don’t know if there’s a GUI interface for upgrading by I just prefer manually running pacman and inspecting things myself. I write a few small helpful Python scripts here and there to manage my abundant, unrepentant pirating, but otherwise I’m just browsing and gaming.

I really don’t think you can (or should) fully escape it, but it’s been minimized to a point where it’s never been before. Depending on where your friends are at, leaning into the hackerman thing might be useful? Get them set up with Ghostty (running some flashy shaders) and oh-my-zsh so they can feel cool, then teach them how to run pacman -Syu or sudo apt upgrade. Once they’re comfortable with the concept, introduce them to a few little helpful Python or bash scripts or show them how to run htop and kill some processes. I think if you can get people sufficiently interested they’re more eager to pick things up on their own and run with it.

I still have a lot of mistrust for the TPM, but that’s OK, my paranoia has room to accommodate everyone.

No. The rebellious spirit is what lights the fire. It may take a few tries to follow through, but I respect the rage >=D

We need to come together as a community and encourage every effort. If you really want to see other people stick to it we need to smash any sense of righteousness or gatekeeping to bits.

I’m still not great with Wine myself, but sit down for an afternoon and try out Bottles. https://www.howtogeek.com/running-windows-apps-on-linux-with-bottles/

I’m on Arch and even the wiki just recommends using the Flatpak. It’s pretty obvious once you get the hang of it, each Bottle is just it’s own little, specific Windows configuration. Try running through the example on that site and installing Notepad++ (or something else of your choice) and you’ll probably have an a-ha! moment.

Isn’t it?

The arguments of preference and convenience are falling by the wayside as megacorporations take more and more control over not just your hardware but your behavioral patterns by dictating what you can install and how it functions. They suck up all your personal, private data for AI training without your consent.

I get it, shit sucks. It really does, but we have to remember who is to blame here and it’s not each other. There has to be some urgency here because this is a battle and we, the consumers, the ordinary people, are surely losing. It’s not about being holier than thou, it’s about lifting each other up.

Agreed. I was actually afraid to modify my KDE desktop for months because of the trauma sustained from just trying to customize Gnome a bit. My configuration is still pretty vanilla, but it’s got enough personal flair to it that it feels uniquely mine and I’m the happiest I’ve been.

Aww, I will always love XFCE and save a place for it in my heart … but I moved to Plasma 2 years ago and haven’t really looked back either >_>

It annoys me how much crap people still give Arch because it did honestly deter me from trying it myself when all this time it was exactly the distro for me. A lot of it is the nature of the rolling releases and pacman just feeling more clean and simple then apt and the inevitable Franken-Debian installs I end up with.

The archinstall script makes installation much easier. After that, choosing all my own apps and having to read the wiki and perform minor configurations on them could be seen as tedious when something like Mint is just more out-of-the-box, but it both helped teach me more about Linux so I have a better understanding of how my own system works when things do rarely go astray and it helps me feel like my system is very personalized and my own. Sometimes I still go, “Wait, why don’t I have this very basic thing or why isn’t it working?” And I find out it’s because I didn’t install a necessary package, but then I learn and build

As far as rolling releases, I update daily because I’m a geeky maniac and I have had better stability doing that the past 2 1/2 years than I ever did in Windows. Truly, no lie. Part of that is Microsoft setting a low bar, but also my system is a simpler build. That’s not to say there have been no issues whatsoever, but I wonder at the people making these claims how much they’ve really used Arch.

My point generally being: don’t let the opinion of some Linux snobs deter you. Try Arch, it may very well be your thing, too.

Inevitably there’ll be a gacha game with US presidents and I’m gonna be exposed to some busty, tarted up anime ladies called “Grover Cleveland”.

This is a good point. I’ve been trying to make it clear in a lot of my predictions that Microsoft doesn’t want or even need full control, just enough. They don’t even need to do anything particular here other than continue to manage github with their current level of incompetence.

Was trying to source an article here, wasn’t there just an outage or some other major issue a few days ago? Anyways …

not only is Windows not very profitable anymore, the real money is at businesses.

Hear me out, this is exactly why they care. Windows as a product isn’t profitable anymore, but as a market share it is. Apple has always enjoyed their locked down ecosystem and Google is trying to completely block side loading on devices we already largely don’t have control over the bootloader. It’s no secret Microsoft has been seething with jealousy for years.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

You’re a soulless corporate ghoul, how do you make those numbers work for you? Why do you think they have the absolute gall to tell you to throw your computer out and get one that supports TPM 2.0? Why do you think there are still so many people willing or not that will swallow that bitter pill that’s Windows 11?

I’m not trying to call you out in particular here or anything, but I think it’s foolish to assume they don’t

Some others have already said the “embrace, extend, extinguish” but here’s my take on it. Pair it with Secure Boot and TPM 2.0

• Embrace: Secure Boot can already work with Linux, how lucky! This gives them not exactly control, but authoritative denial over your boot process and hardware.
• Extend: This is the part that remains to be seen. If they feel threatened enough by the shift in the gaming landscape, mind you not over losing out on sales or the hearts of gamers or anything, but again control, they may begin to make Linux offerings. A concession to allow an honest to god, thick Office client on Linux would certainly appeal to some. Adobe gets in on that action to back them up with Photoshop and Activision with Call of Duty, etc.
• Extinguish: TPM 2.0. One of the less talked about features of this is remote attestation (“Remote attestation allows changes to the user’s computer to be detected by authorized parties. For example, software companies can identify unauthorized changes to software, including users modifying their software to circumvent commercial digital rights restrictions.” - DRM). We’re already seeing this with CoD on Windows. They’ll allow you to run much requested Windows software on Linux, even provide direct support possibly, but at the cost of not precisely control but authoritative denial. Which still works out to be control in most ways since if you want to use the software and they are to remotely attest, they can also insist that part of that attestation is you running some sort of telemetry or not running software they disagree with.

The reason I think this route is highly likely is because it plays well with uninformed consumers. To the untrained eye it looks like they’re giving ground and actually allowing for broader support of their software while effectively gaining control over the environment once again and removing the biggest benefits of running FOSS on your system.

Anyone know what music visualizer that is in the screenshot near the bottom under entry 2? Quick search of the available music widgets and I didn’t see anything that looked like it.

As someone who tries to practice ethical piracy as best they can, my advice is to not get caught up in the details.

1. Purchase the books wherever you best want to show your support, and
2. Pirate a copy from wherever best meets your criteria

👍

I don’t really have a concise answer, but allow me to ramble from personal experience for a bit:

I’m a sysadmin that was VERY heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. It was all I worked with professionally and really all I had ever used personally as well. I grew up with Windows 3.1 and just kept on from there, although I did mess with Linux from time to time.

Microsoft continues to enshittify Windows in many well-documented ways. From small things like not letting you customize the Start menu and task bar, to things like microstuttering from all the data it’s trying to load over the web, to the ads it keeps trying to shove into various corners. A million little splinters that add up over time. Still, I considered myself a power user, someone able to make registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts to suit my needs.

Arch isn’t particularly difficult for anyone who is comfortable with OSes and has excellent documentation. After installation it is extremely minimal, coming with a relatively bare set of applications to keep it functioning. Using the documentation to make small decisions for yourself like which photo viewer or paint app to install feels empowering. Having all those splinters from Windows disappear at once and be replaced with a system that feels both personal and trustworthy does, in a weird way, kind of border on an almost religious experience. You can laugh, but these are the tools that a lot of us live our daily lives on, for both work and play. Removing a bloated corporation from that chain of trust does feel liberating.

As to why particularly Arch? I think it’s just that level of control. I admit it’s not for everyone, but again, if you’re at least somewhat technically inclined, I absolutely believe it can be a great first distro, especially for learning. Ubuntu has made some bad decisions recently, but even before that, I always found myself tinkering with every install until it became some sort of Franken-Debian monster. And I like pacman way better than apt, fight me, nerds.

Protontricks can help for some games. Personally I used it to install Openplanet for Trackmania which doesn’t have any sort of explicit Linux support specified.

What Protontricks does is allow you to run installation files within the context of a steam game, as you mentioned. Simply launch Protontricks and select the game you’re trying to modify and it will mount it properly for you. Then choose “Run an arbitrary executable (.exe/.msi/.msu)” and proceed to run the installer as you would normally.

Sometimes the path can still be a bit janky. For example when Openplanet wanted to install to the Trackmania directory as mounted through Protontricks, I had to specify: Z:\home<USERNAME>.steam\steam\steamapps\common\Trackmania.

https://www.pling.com/p/2142966/

Maybe not all that close, but it’s the best I can think of right now.

I think it has the general old school vibe, maybe you could tweak the colors to be a bit brighter like your example?

https://x-plus.store/products/n150-netbook

I picked one of these up after it got some buzz the other week. Still waiting for delivery, though, will report back once I’ve had some hands-on time with it! Probably just going to do Arch.

In addition to this, or rather before, you can run pacman -D --asdeps package_name to mark a package as a dep. If it is no longer required by something else it will be removed with the above. This can be useful for things that are deps that you installed manually at some point for some reason.

Oh, that’s some amazing info, thanks!

I had noticed this might be a problem when I was setting something up and tried to install a dependency that was already on the system. It informed me it was being set to explicit and I wondered if it might lead to a situation like that.

EDIT: More information provided. I disagree with the upvoted comment implying you should leave your system alone because you might break something. You’re using Arch, and part of the reason to use Arch is understanding how you built and maintain your system. Understanding how to inspect your system and perform proper maintenance is a crucial part of that. Read and think carefully before taking any actions and make sure any important information is backed up before taking major actions. Without throwing too much further shade, I find it disappointing so many in the community would take that stance and discourage you from pursuing this further.

When I switched to Arch, I started a notebook in Obsidian with a bunch of different information in it, I have a section devoted to Maintenance. Here are a few things I’ve put in there:

Clean package cache with paccache: https://ostechnix.com/recommended-way-clean-package-cache-arch-linux/

Clean orphaned dependencies: sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)

• https://man.archlinux.org/man/pacman.8.en
• Qtdg, Q (Query) t (unrequired) d (dependencies) g (groups)
• Rs, R (Remove) s (recursive)

Additionally, you can run pacman -Qe to list the packages you yourself have explicitly installed with pacman, or pacman -Qdt to list the packages that are dependencies of other packages. Use pacman -Qm to list packages not found in the official repositories (i.e., things installed through yay). This will allow you to review packages you may have explicitly installed in the past for some reason, but now find you no longer need.

For yay, I’m unsure if I should be using -Yc, -Sc, or -Scc. If anyone has more info with that, I’d appreciate it.

For flatpak: flatpak uninstall --unused

And for journals: journalctl --vacuum-time 7days

That’s most of the “automatic” stuff, cruft that can be cleaned out with little to no consequence. Other than that, you’ll just have to manually review what you have on your system.

If anyone has other commands or comments on the ones I provided, I’d be happy to accept further advice here as well 😃