AnIndefiniteArticle

Such as sata cables for quickly hot plugging hard drives you are testing/inspecting/cataloguing and don’t want to open the whole case between each drive, or leave the case open.

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Obligatory boomer song

Thanks for the leads and the good conversation. I have found that being an idiot in public and then deescalating is one of the fastest ways to gather information.

Thanks for pointing out that in this case the DM is using X regardless of whatever graphical environment gets loaded when the user logs in. This really is a moot point/discussion. I’m still glad I raised it to get perspectives like yours.

You’re right that I should play around with wlroots a bit more. It’s been a while, personally. Mostly because it’s been a while since I’ve had time to just play around with my system. My life is at a point that it looks like I’ll have that free time soon, for better or for worse.

I’ll note that I do like alternative init systems for diversity and competition and because systemd was very hungry and rigid. An init system is also a bit more fundamental to system stability than a display server, so I think it’s reasonable to be critical of systemd and Wayland for contradictory reasons. Systemd has also come a very long way in the past decade plus. I have also seen it learn from the other ideas implemented in its competition, mirroring your argument. Diversity and unification are not at odds with each other, but are different parts of the same cycle of improvement.

Good to know that this has been implemented in your favorite DE! Considering how Wayland often implements things, it’s probably implemented on the DE-level, leading to a fractured configuration ecosystem. Being implemented in Wayland is different from being implemented in some of the DEs that use Wayland.

edit: if I’m wrong about that, and it is implemented in Wayland itself, please continue to correct me!

It’s not just about it being a config file, it’s also about having access to a powerful tool like xrandr within that config file.

That’s kind of my point. Something like randr is more fundamental than the DE, and its configuration shouldn’t be fractured by being DE-dependent. I personally don’t like DEs at all, and like the ability to control a more minimal system.

I’ve never needed any of those things.

I do need to change monitor configurations.

I once had an old TV that I used as a monitor that had 1027p worth of pixels instead of 1080p. Auto detection tools said it was 1080p. With xrandr I was able to modify the output to 1027p so I didn’t lose the edges of the display to the TV’s broken forced overscan design. Could you do that with Wayland?

I am serious, and I’ll tell you exactly what will change my mind. I need real tools instead of “upgrades” that have less functionality and are less usable. If Wayland (or whatever comes next) can deliver on functionality, I’ll sing its praises. For now I’m on X.

Give me real tools or get off my lawn rewilded patch of native plants and bugs!

This is why X11 is better. I’d rather have settings like this in a text file that I can copy over to my next machine than have to navigate a UI that will change on a different DE or the next upgrade.

Backwards compatibility, portability, and text-based interfaces are a virtue.

X config files aren’t “hacky scripts”, they are fundamentally more powerful, customizable, usable, and future-proof. Xrandr is a powerful and capable interface with applications across the system.

When Wayland adopts these kinds of powerful interfaces with decades of refinement I’ll switch to it. I don’t want to keep track of whether my DE uses wlroots or gnome or plasma and their independent/redundant/feature-lacking randr alternatives. Randrs should be more fundamental to the display operation than the DE. Wayland is fundamentally hacky and broken.

Edit: thank you all for the discussion. I’d like to clarify a point. I don’t just want a text file with configuration settings that implement features that I need to beg/bother the devs for. They are likely to have better things to do and it might not be a priority for them. I want access to powerful tools via the configuration files that I can make do pretty much anything if I read the documentation. Xrandr is such a tool. I don’t want setting for a feature that has to be baked into the DE which I have to beg to have implemented and which will be implemented differently across different DEs. I want flexible, dynamic, modular tools.

Yes.

These ecosystems are well studied.

This paper from the oil industry opens with the sentence “Methane-oxidizing bacteria (MOB) have long been recognized as an important bioindicator for oil and gas exploration.” We literally look for these ecosystems to know where to extract their food.

This isn’t controversial in the slightest. We are destroying unique ecosystems with every barrel we extract.

Ok, but what about the ecosystems dependent on that chemical energy staying underground?

It’s a thermostat.

I’m coming from a field where supporting software written in the 70s is the norm.

Your argument is horribly short-sighted and wasteful.

Only 16 years old is extremely recent software that ought to be easily maintained in any sane world.

True, but the desktop environment that they develop in-house is what I grade them on. Not the color themes and backgrounds that they put on desktop environments produced by other projects. You can install other desktop environments on any linux distro. Ubuntu only produces Unity.

Some community and state colleges can be pretty cheap, and most schools offer night classes for those who work all day. A gen-ed like geology is likely to have such hours available for this community of night students, especially if you live in an area where geology is related to employment. Usually pretty cheap to take one class at a time through something like an Adult and Continuing Education program.

Valve’s use-case for choosing a gnu+linux distro is likely to be different from yours. Therefore, commentary about Valve’s needs and choices may or may not be relevant to your use-case.

If you’re new, I recommend mint. Because of ubuntu’s questionable choices at times vs debian’s steady hand, I recommend the debian edition of mint, LMDE. It’s a rolling distribution that requires fewer total reinstalls. Debian’s low-effort stability and security works for nearly all use-cases. Mint adds user-friendly settings, updates, and package management.

Cinnamon is mint’s desktop environment, what they add on top of ubuntu or debian. Like xfce, it’s lighter-weight and more responsive than plasma or gnome on lower-end or aging hardware, but it’s prettier than xfce without rice. Although if you wanna rice and make it pretty, check out a tiling window manager.

Let Valve handle the complex stuff and hire employees to stress-test the latest packages in Arch and just use what they package for you in proton. Start with a debian derivative. If you start wanting to tinker around because you’re getting comfortable, or for some reason desperately need a newer version of a package, you can try software from other package management schemes like guix or flatpak that run on top of your stable debian system.

When you’re comfortable with using the command line tools and managing the gnu operating system, you can try a more command-line centered and manually assisted distros like arch and gentoo

Try switching to different versions of your graphics driver and/or kernel. Nvidia cards get really finicky about the version matchups, especially as they age. Try different combinations of the versions that are available via pacman, and maybe it’ll work. You may need to start keeping an eye on updates to your kernel and graphics driver to see if a new update fixes your issue. Welcome to life with an nvidia card. I bought an nvidia card once in 2013. By 2016 I had to start playing this game on upgrades. At one point, the graphics driver was causing kernel panics until I downgraded both and waited a few months. Very happy with AMD.

The CLI has many advantages over a gui. For one, actions are reific, repeatable, and scriptable. This saves time as you can reuse previous commands and edit them appropriately for the current situation. This makes it easy to look back and verify what you have done. The command line is also a much more stable interface. GUIs change all the time and it’s hard to remember where things might be located. The structure of the gnu operating system accessed via the command line facilitates the discovery of installed commands/programs and documentation. You can record these actions once and repeat them on many machines. You can script common activities (eg bulk file renaming) that make file and data management easier.