Arch, on well supported hardware. That means no Nvidia. No Ultra 5 series CPUs.

I don’t know anyone who works in tech (not IT) that is allowed to use Wangblows for development. If you’re a programmer/software developer, you’ll 1000% have to use Linux, either directly or indirectly. From small hardware devices, to automous cars, to simple web sites, all of that uses Linux. Lots of places give you a Linux laptop or at the very least give you Mac—because they consider Mac close enough to Linux. I’ve never needed to use Macroshit Office Suite for anything related to work. Zoom and Slack are the standard in Silicon Valley and both work fine on Linux.

Here’s my PR:

-A small and tidy task organiser 
+A small and giddy task organiser 

Ah, fuck.

I just started donating to GNOME, Guix, and LogSeq. I wish more people used OpenCollective. Sometimes I see orgs there, but I’m not sure if they actually use that account…

Ufff. Yeah, I also hit a slop mountain of videos when searching for Seafile comparisons…

Also like Ente uses: https://github.com/ente-io/ente/pull/7945#issuecomment-3538457041

i knew what i did and why i did it, two years ago, after which i never had to touch it again until now

Hahaha, true. This is why I try to keep as many notes as possible, leave lots of comments, add READMEs, links, and otherwise document what I did and why.

It’s not perfect, it’s often tedious, and I don’t always do it, but when I come back 2 years later wondering why I set some random option, it’s pretty nice having at least some hint.

you understand it more when you build something by yourself, so it’s easier for you to fix it when it’s broken.

For me, this is a big selling point. Instead of trying to figure out why someone did something or wrestling with their decisions, I know what I did, why I did it, and if necessary, and I can change it.

Oooooh, ok. TIL.

At least Arch and Debian seem to use top from procps-ng. Good to know.

I missed this part during my first read:

This screen allows you to customise which fields are displayed in the currently selected window. Use cursor keys (or Alt + j and k) to move up and down this list, d to toggle whether a field is displayed and s to choose the field by which the window is sorted.

and when I tried it, it seemed like my commands weren’t doing anything… so in case anyone else finds this helpful…

How to sort columns in top.

• Launch top
• Press f (not SHIFT+F)
• Use arrow keys or alt+j / alt+k to select a column
• Press s to sort by the column you’ve currently selected
  • note: you won’t get any obvious feedback, this is normal… I guess
  • look at the top line: whose current sort field is $COLUMN_NAME
  • this line will change when you press s
• Press q to exit the Fields Management screen
• Selected column should now be sorted from largest to smallest

At this point, top may not look like it sorted the selected column. It may be helpful to tell top to highlight the currently sorted column. Press x to do this.

Now it should be easier to tell which column was sorted.

Wait… what?

$ top --version
top from procps-ng 4.0.5-dirty

The following utilities are provided by procps:

• free - Report the amounts of free and used memory in the system
• hugetop - Report hugepage usage of processes and the system as a whole
• kill - Send a signal to a process based on PID
• pgrep - List processes based on name or other attributes
• pkill - Send a signal to a process based on name or other attributes
• pmap - Report the memory map of a process
• ps - Report process information including PID and resource usage
• pwdx - Report the current working directory of a process
• skill - Obsolete version of pgrep/pkill
• slabtop - Display kernel slab cache information in real time
• snice - Renice a process
• sysctl - Read or write kernel parameters at run-time
• tload - Graphical representation of system load average
• top - Dynamic real-time view of running processes
• uptime - Display how long the system has been running
• vmstat - Report virtual memory statistics
• w - Report logged in users and what they are doing
• watch - Execute a program periodically, showing output fullscreen

https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps

Oh, so these guys manage top and a few other common utilities.

I would often just grab htop because I had no idea how to read the CPU usage out of top.

lol, same! 1t gets me 90% of the functionality I use in htop.

Wow. wat. This is top??

The only reason I use htop is because I never bothered to learn top. I’m totally down to avoid downloading and installing another utility though. The time to learn top is TODAY!

On Guix, I could bisect (like git bisecting) my OS. So usually what would happen is:

• I’m running in a good state
• I accidentally mess something up
• oh no
• guix system switch-generation $n, where n is the last known good state
• then binary search until I find the first bad generation
• look at the config changes I made
• fix them
• back to good state

Unfortunately, my laptop is too new so Guix isn’t fully compatible with all my hardware. (Yes, I was using nonguix)

But that was a pretty neat experience compared to debugging something on Arch.

Yeah! CUPS is great. I just connected my Brother printer to it and everything Just Works.

Ah, nice ok. Your post got me to look at dropbear a little more closely, but since I got a bunch of disks, I think USB unlock makes more sense in my setup. I’m using a keyfile on the USB to unlock a bunch of disks on boot. But if I only had one, then dropbear would be more doable for me.

Neat! Interesting post!

Ah, cool cool. Makes sense. Are you unlocking 1 disk or many disks with the dropbear setup?

Any guides you’d recommend to try this out?

🫡 Thank you for your service.