After using i3 for a minute (probably under a month or so), I decided to give bspwm a try. Nuked and paved the G5 with Arco + bspwm. Slowly winding through and figuring out more granularity working with WMs. I’m beginning to understand the importance of these .dotfiles I keep seeing people hoarding. Now, I’m slowly hoarding my own!
I spent a lot of time fixing my first bug on KDE (kio).
Haven’t finished it yet due to learning the code, but I’m making progress and once I have time again (likely on weekend) I hope to submit my changes.
Spending the week (and the forseeable future) working from home due to COVID-19, which allows me to fiddle with my Linux laptop during work hours. It’s mostly work-related. Played around with Ubuntu 20.04 as others have. Looking forward to seeing System76’s take on it eventually.
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After that post, it is time to inform everybody, that Ubuntu solved that weekend bug during the same weekend. Great service!! I also like to promote ZFS again, because their snapshots saved my day.
Afterwards I installed radeontop to feed my Conky display, so now I show gpu load and vram usage in Conky 
Nowadays you have to start radeontop as sudo user. So as sudoer I write radeons output to a file for 5 minutes and conky reads the last entry from that file by the tail command and displays the content.
By moving that file to a shared folder, I could use the same display in some of the VMs if useful.
My week crashed when I tried installing the new beta of Devuan 3 onto real hardware (worked fine off the live USB). It (with a little help from a befuddled user - me) crapping (can I say that) over the boot areas on both SSDs in the machine… sigh.
I have now reformatted the SSDs and have my #1 choice (MX-19) back installed and working on SSD #1, SSD #2 is partitioned ready for 3 “play” distros again.
Moral of the week, don’t try and do anything “clever” when you are feeling ill, tired from insomnia, at 2am.
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Now that’s a slogan I would like to see printed on a coffee mug. These are wise words to live by.
I just wasted about 4 hours trying to install a Docker container of the Mattermost Team (not Enterprise) Server on a VM. The instructions were garbage, you’ll only install a broken server. To confuse matters further, there are 2 sets of Docker install instructions, one on their own docs server, and one at Github. Both are garbage, and I tried both.
Then I rolled back the VM to before the Docker setup to start the install again afresh, and followed the plain-Jane, non-Docker install instructions. Worked like a charm!
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This week I investigated what it would take to install Mattermost Team server on a Raspberry Pi 4. It’s a pretty straightforward install (if you avoid Docker) on AMD64, but it gets much more tricky on any sort of ARM SBC, should you just go by their official documentation. Here are my detailed findings, after running into dead ends with their official releases and documentation for Mattermost.
I was able to get unstuck again once I found this.
I made the switch from Manjaro to Xubuntu.
Manjaro and other arch-based distributions seem to have an issue with my Blue Yeti mic atm, where the input and output get frozen or unfrozen seemingly at random. For example I can have the mic muted via the button on the front, but as soon as I start playing audio (a YT video etc) it’ll unmute itself. Other times it’ll freeze the use of the button meaning I can’t unmute or mute at all.
Xubuntu however is practically perfect for me. Works exactly as I’d want it to, runs buttery smooth and it’s fast as hell.
Think I’ve met my new daily driver 
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Week 2 working from home, and I had a little hiccup last night with PopOS. System76 pushed a new Nvidia driver module to stay in line with Ubuntu upstream and it broke X for me. To their credit, I was able to call a real human being and he worked with me on it. Weird configuration quirk on my end having to do with my hybrid graphics setup. Got it sorted. It’s kind of surreal in 2020 to a) talk to a real human being for support and b) that support being for a Linux box. Props to Thomas at System76.
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I was testing Linux Mint Debian Edition for the Big Daddy Linux Live distro challenge and ended up not sticking with it. I hadn’t tried a Debian-based desktop in a long time which was the interesting part of this challenge to me. That led me to try Debian testing which I then updated to Sid. I got what I wanted out of testing Debian but they was missing Cinnamon. Fedora 32 beta had just been released so I tried the Cinnamon Spin which, as always, was fantastic.
I have been running Ubuntu 20.04 for a few weeks now without issue but unfortunately some updates this week led to problems for me. I went back to 19.10 for the time being in the interest of getting some work done. I’ll go back and try 20.04 in a couple days to see if things have settled down.
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I’ve been testing Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 (LMDE4) for discussion on BDLL, mintCast and Distrohoppers Digest. Had a problem with installing on My Dell laptops as Grub does not install properly on the 2 models I chose E7440 & E6540 so I decided to do an install on a Lenovo X230i ThinkPad and it installed without a hitch. With the Dells I installed Mint 19.3 as a dual boot after the LMDE4 install and this installed Grub and I can now boot into the LMDE4 install. It was suggested on the Mint forum that this must be a setting in the BIOS on the Dells that is conflicting with Grub not had a dig around yet but will and report at some time.
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This week I went down a deep rabbit-hole, trying to shoehorn Mattermost Team Server into a Raspberry Pi 4 (which is technically possible, but the trail is still not blazed, and the Mattermost core developers, by and large, don’t seem interesting in supporting ARM at all).
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I installed Arch in Boxes following this excellent guide. Now to leave it on for a month and see if I’m responsible enough to replace Solus on my desktop with Arch!
I’m running Debian Bullseye Sid with Cinnamon and I’m about 90% satisfied. I’m having troubles with running a Virtual Machine without getting errors, but DT ran a video last week and I might try that.
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This week I installed Arch Cinnamon on a tester, using @EricAdams Archfi & Archdi from his video. I had better luck using the Arch way for the base and using Archdi for Cinnamon. Archdi makes a cleaner install, but I’m trying to find the secret sauce to do it all the Arch way. I really like rolling releases and I want to compare to see if I can make it as good as my Debian Bullseye Cinnamon that I changed the repositories over to testing. I used the net installer for Debian install.
I doing testing in VirtualBox so I can get everything right and taking lots of notes. I’m making some big screw-ups and able to fix them in TTY. I’ve learned a lot in the past 2 months. Loving every minute of it. A lot of discussion here is over my head but I am learning some stuff through osmosis.
I’ve had my struggles with Archfi for sure. I started using EndeavourOS in December and that’s what I still use. It’s pretty minimal and the extra things it does install are actually useful to me (like easily setting mirrors) so I’ve stuck with it. The community is good as well.
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Some weeks ago I installed Ubuntu 20.04, but I detected a number of issues related to a fundamental incompatibility between Ubuntu’s zsys and ZFS, so I deleted zsys from my host OS. I only follow further development of zsys in one of my VMs. Basically Ubuntu introduced their own snapshot/clone administration separate from zfs and I think, that will create issues.
I will not explain more, till we have the final release and if justified I will come back to this issue in detail, but first on OpenZFS, ZOL and Ubuntu web sites. I don’t think the issue has been caused by the developers, I think the issue has been caused by absent management from Canonical and to a lesser extend of ZOL and OpenZFS. This month I want to give the developers the chance to complete their vision undisturbed by more of my noise. So wait for my humble excuses or for a detailed explanation
Agreed, EndeavourOS did seem to hit the ground running from the very 1st release. I rather like it, it and Arco keep swapping places in my Arch based distro choices. Arco comes in a little heavier (I tend to simply opt for the basic ArcoLinux, not the B or D options). I’m liking Manjaro too but itis another step away from basic Arch - nice though.
Anyway, EndeavourOS I can see why you like it, and I could certainly live with i as a daily driver if I got fed up of MX and/or Debian (not in the foreseeable future).
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The online installer is really the secret sauce. One iso, all the desktops!
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Endeavor OS has gotten the multi DE iso all set? That’s great!
My Linux week has been like all my others since October of last year. Looking at busted laptop. Will be fixed or replaced soon.