Niels K. logo Niels K.

The babysitter feels well enough so that I can see tomorrow Star Wars \o/

…perfekte Sicherheit gibt hält das gefühlt so ne Woche… So rein aus der Erfahrung. Anekdotische Evidenz, ich weiß.

…ihr Hirn aus. “Ach ich hab doch AV-Software, da kann mir ja nichts passieren”. Und wenn man es dann mal erklärt bekommt, dass es keine…

…leider recht geben. Meiner Erfahrung nach ist der Nutzen sehr gering, vor allem bei den aktuellen Sachen und die Nutzer schalten eher…

Also wenn das stimmt, dass Fefe gesagt hat, dass er AV-Software nicht mag und man einfach nicht Überfall hinklicken soll, muss ich ihm…

How often did EAD used stuff from R&D1 (besides the engine of Kaeru no tame ni Kane wa naru for Link’s Awakening)? #nintendo

Watching a long play in 2x is like watching a weird 100% speed run.

I wanted to finally see Star Wars tomorrow but the babysitter is sick :´´(

Switching from Manjaro to Arch

When switching to Linux over a year ago I decided originally that I use Mint. But when I read about the suggested upgrade path which essentially said that you should re-install on each distribution upgrade, I searched for another solution. And that’s how I found distributions with a rolling release cycle. Most distributions release a major version of their distribution and between those major releases updates usually contain mainly security and bug fixes. With a rolling release you get “all the time” updates and there is no major release. Right now the best known rolling release-distribution is probably Arch[footnote]and in the past Gentoo[/footnote]. But Arch is kind of intimidating since it installs only quite a minimal system and after the installation you just land in a TTY, no graphical user interface at all. In addition it seemed too bleeding edge and has a reputation for being unstable. But it has right now the best documentation in the Linux-world in my opinion[footnote]The documentation of FreeBSD is still better though.[/footnote]. So I searched for an alternative and found Manjaro. Manjaro is based on Arch but with a delay. They take the packages from Arch, test them more and apply additional patches for more stability. So far so good. When I wanted to get newer software I had to switch to more unstable repositories from Manjaro and ended up on unstable which is more or less on the level of Arch stable. I used it for months on end without getting into any trouble. So I decided to switch to Arch since I can start from anew and can have only the software installed I want. Manjaro comes with a lot of software installed to be more comfortable to use.

The installation was surprisingly easy. I use full disk encryption. After finding a guide it was easy to install. Since I keep /home on a separate volume, I could keep it and needed only to install the base system. The fstab, the file that tells the system which volumes to mount, was not generated in a way that I could boot at first. But after a little bit of fiddling[footnote]I had to move from UUIDs to mapping the LVM-volumes.[/footnote] I could boot. And after that I only had to install the stuff I needed. I used my old config files for Xorg which were already customized for my system. And in a couple of hours I was up and running. Slower than with most Linux-distributions but the system has so far only the software I need.

But then I noticed something else: The system worked better. Things I couldn’t get to work in the past, I could get to work now. I am using only a window manager (i3) and not a desktop environment. Thus I have to get stuff to work because some comforts are missing in comparison to using KDE, Gnome, Xfce, LXDE or whatever. In the past I had to start pcmanfm to automount the attached USB-hard disks. With Arch I suddenly could get udisks to work as it should work. So automounting happens now on boot and I don’t need to start pcmanfm anymore. In the past I never could get my bluetooth headset to work with my computer. It might connect but directly disconnect or no audio reached the headset etc. I tried a lot but it just didn’nt work. Today I tried it again with Arch. After 10 minutes there was audio coming out of my headset. Some AUR-packages[footnote]AUR stands for Arch User Repository.[/footnote] were problematic or didn’t work at all. Now I have no problems at all so far.

I will see how stable my system will be and if anything breaks. But so far using Arch is a real improvement over Manjaro. But Manjaro gave me an entry to the world to Arch that eased me into it. Thus I am happy now to using Arch, but I am grateful for projects like Manjaro or Antergos for being an entry-point to distributions like Arch.