It sounds like a hardware issue that may not be captured by a software screenshot.

I’m in a similar boat. I use old computers for spare parts and hobby projects (e.g. I did Linux From Scratch on an old second-hand Thinkpad I picked up on a whim). I think cheap second hand computers are great for tinkerers e.g. you can flash custom firmware without worrying about bricking the mobo.

You could also use them as servers if you have any services you want to host.

Also if you truly have no use for them, fix them up, install something like Linux Mint on them, and give them away.

Why do you like Arch? If you want the minimalism but you don’t want to compile everything yourself, I’d recommend Void Linux. It’s a lovely little distro; I only don’t daily drive it because of less package availability than Arch+AUR, and I couldn’t be bothered to package so many things myself. But I don’t remember their servers ever being down when I used it.

I’d probably recommend LFS over Gentoo for that—you do more “yourself” and I found the LFS instructions easier to follow than the Gentoo install guide. And I’d say I learned more about Linux from LFS than from installing Gentoo. But LFS was done over about a month or so for me (not nonstop ofc, just in my free time) whereas Gentoo was 1 or 2 days.

Guest Wi-Fi is common for that reason. I’ve got guest Wi-Fi set up so that guests can access the internet but they can’t access my LAN.

As others have said, no for the Linux partition; it’s the same arch, socket type, etc. CachyOS’s kernel probably contains everything you need.

For the Windows partition you might have problems though. Iirc Windows connects licences to motherboards, to prevent disk cloning to circumvent buying licences, so Windows may think you’ve cloned your drive to pirate Windows. I’ve never tried secure boot but I know W11 requires TPM too so if you’ve got secure boot you should look into how to switch to a new motherboard on Windows.

Outdated how? I use it for my daily driver and it works fine for me. It’s a fairly simple program and the 0.3.x river protocol is fairly stable so I would doubt it’s become outdated, but if it is, you should be able to patch it yourself given the simplicity of the program.

Also I remember seeing screenshots where PDFs looked transparent or matched the terminal colors. Is that actually a feature of some of these viewers ?

Zathura lets you recolour and theme pdfs, yes. See zathurarc(5). You can set alpha using "rgba(r, g, b, a)" when setting a colour, e.g. set to 0.8 for 0.8 opacity.

https://gitlab.com/Grazen0/river-shifttags

Not sure what ly is but basically I’m saying you should be using the dbus-run-session sway command to run sway instead of just sway. If dbus is installed and the daemon is running then this will allow you to e.g. open links in Discord.

The commenter talking about xdg desktop portal is correct for the file picker; you need to install a portal for that.

I can’t get links to open from discord

Are you using dbus? Display managers normally will launch graphical sessions with dbus for you, but if you’re manually launching from the tty, use dbus-run-session sway (or the name of the executable you want to run). dbus is used for applications to communicate with each other, e.g. Discord to communicate with your browser. And you need dbus installed and the daemon running, of course.

I think that’s a misunderstanding of how software works. More features != better. I’m aware that many users think that, but it’s not a common view in the foss community. People in the foss community largely hate corporate enshittified bloated software and won’t use a proprietary fork that some company has added an LLM to. A project doesn’t need mainstream appeal; think about all the foss utilities written for Linux and BSDs where the target audience is “nerds”/enthusiasts/etc. These projects maintain themselves and their popularity just fine with a limited target audience. Besides, most foss isn’t for the average computer user. There’s a lot of foss that isn’t user software (libraries and OS/kernelspace software), and then there’s software like curl which can be for end users but is mostly used as a library, and the end users who use curl directly are a more technical crowd who most likely care about foss. The mainstream crowd that wants their iPhones and copilots are not making decisions between a foss option and a proprietary option.

How does permissive licensing lead to corporate takeover? Companies can do proprietary forks of permissively licensed foss projects, but they can’t automatically take over the upstream.

Not “everything”, and I wouldn’t say there’s any distro that lets you “control everything”. e.g. look at Alpine Linux, which uses musl, busybox, and OpenRC, whereas Arch uses glibc, GNU coreutils, and systemd. These three choices are “locked in” for Alpine and Arch—you can’t change them. And it’s unlikely for any distro to let you choose all these things because that creates a lot of maintenance work for the distro maintainers.

I suppose Linux From Scratch lets you “control everything”, but I wouldn’t call it a distro (there’s nothing distributed except a book!), and hardly anyone daily drives it.

I use Artix (fork of Arch with init freedom)—the main reason why I prefer an Arch base specifically is for the AUR. The reason why I prefer a minimalistic distro in general, is because I want to be able to choose what software I install and how I set up my system. For example I don’t use a full DE so any distro that auto-installs a DE for me will install a bunch of software I won’t use. You also usually get a lot more control over partitioning etc with minimalistic distros—lets me fuck around with more weird setups if I want to try something out.

To be clear I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using distros that have more things “pre-packaged”. It’s a matter of personal preference. The category of “poweruser” makes sense—some users want more fine-grained control over their systems, whilst some users don’t care and want something that roughly works with minimal setup. Or perhaps you do care about fine-grained control over your system, but it just so happens that your ideal system is the same as what comes pre-installed with some distro. Do whatever works for you.

The android development always just seemed… off, idk, I just got weird feelings about it and the fork.

Could you elaborate at all?

That’s about the upstream Syncthing Android app. This post is about a fork that was continued to be maintained after the “official” Android app stopped being developed.

Most popular VPNs have some form of obfuscation options in their apps. But if you’re using e.g. raw Wireguard you won’t be able to use their obfuscation function.

Btw technically they can’t really outlaw VPNs as a whole, only commercial/“privacy” VPNs. They couldn’t really tell if you’re e.g. using your friend’s PC as a VPN to access their LAN, since it’s a residential IP. Unless they’re looking for Wireguard packets, but that seems like an unlikely law since it’d piss off a lot of businesses that use VPNs to let their workers access the company intranet at home.

Surely Google has the resources to fix the bugs themselves. Most FOSS projects probably appreciate code contributions more than money.

i3 doesn’t work with Wayland because it’s an X11 WM… You wouldn’t complain about X11 because Sway doesn’t work on it.

Btw, Sway is a drop-in Wayland replacement for i3 if you want to move to Wayland. i3 configs work with Sway; it’s an i3 clone.