Arch is made out to be a lot harder and unstable than it really is. And AUR is a great resource but realistically you won’t even use it that much. At least I haven’t. I used it for Brave Browser package before switching to Firefox, some WINE gst plugin, and some other small stuff I don’t remember.

Also keep in mind even if it’s a AUR package, you can just install the package like normal if it’s a binary (it will be named with a -bin at the end, like brave-bin), so just because you’re using some packages from AUR it doesn’t mean you have to build lots of packages from source every time you update.

People hear scary stuff about some random update breaking the system but it’s exaggerated.

You definitely can break stuff with user error and sometimes if you’re not paying attention while updating you can get problems (combination of bad defaults + user error).

Main problem is that you can do whatever you want, but you might not actually know what you really want to do or you might not be doing what you meant to do, and Arch Linux will let you do it even if something breaks due to it.

And well that’s going to be same regardless of OS but it’s more accessible on Arch.

However you shouldn’t be too worried about it, in the basically worst case scenario you might need a Live USB and another device with an internet connection to look up and what you need to do to fix what’s wrong, but you can always count on that there’s a fix.

Most other OSes if you have a problem, depending on what it is you might just be stuck with it.

Biggest noob mistake I recall doing was that I had my old windows hard drive as extra storage and slowly moving stuff over once in a while, so I hadn’t reformatted it and I also wasn’t aware of that the default Linux NTFS driver wasn’t very good and that I should’ve gotten NTFS-3G if I weren’t going to reformat.

Well one day while not paying attention while updating my system through pacman (yay actually) I was also copying files from my old windows hard drive and I didn’t even look before just pressing accept on some AUR package rebuild.

Well it turns out that package was formerly part of Extra repository and thus it used to be a binary package, but now since it was moved to the AUR and it didn’t have -bin it was changed to a package to be built from source, and if I were to continue using it I should’ve changed which package.

But I just hit accept and it started chugging away, and it needed more RAM that I have and apparently there’s no safe guard for this (at least not by default) and by the time I noticed that my RAM usage was getting to high the system already got too sluggish and I was too late to end the process.

I also didn’t know about SysRq at the time so the only option I knew was to force shut down by holding down the power button for 5 seconds.

My actual system was still fine and all but my old windows hard drive that was transferring files got borked. It wasn’t completely bricked so I eventually salvaged it and it’s since been reformatted too, but I thought I had bricked it at the time.

Well that might still seem a bit scary but that was me making several user errors in a row, and at the end of the day it still wasn’t even a big problem.

Disclaimer: my experience is only with Arch Linux (daily drive for 2 years) and a little bit of Linux Mint on a relative’s PC.

For me I found it more tedious to get games working through WINE on Linux Mint compared to on Arch Linux, some packages I wanted seemingly don’t exist in the apt repositories (wine mono and wine gecko) and had to be manually installed.

I also had some trouble because the package names were different compared to on pacman, especially the lib32 ones, but to be fair I would probably have had the same issue on Arch if I first used Linux Mint then Arch so not having the same package names isn’t inherently a fault of Linux Mint.

But it wasn’t that it wasn’t doable, it was just more tedious, and to be fair daily driving Arch for 2 years compared to using Linux Mint every once in a while means I’m way less familiar with Linux Mint.

Do you use workspaces on Windows?

Tbh I didn’t know that’s a thing

How does it compare to PollyMC? It was super easy to use and you can play both offline without an account but also online with a Mojang Account. (Java versions)

Admittedly I didn’t actually try to play it online since I just looked it up for a nephew.

I used the Linux AppImage, just download and run it and you’re good (might have to install new java runtime depending on what you have already), but there’s also Windows and Mac versions.

p.s. I’m not really into Minecraft and don’t know what’s up, but apparently there’s some drama or something and PollyMC (with 2 'L’s) is not to be confused with PolyMC (one ‘L’).

Finally someone that mentions an Enable Right Click extension. There’s a few out there but I use “Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy” as well.

On top of return youtube dislike & sponsorblock I will highly recommend BlockTube, it optionally removes shorts, the video pause and & popup asking if you’re still there, and a few other things. I’ve tried the “remove youtube loudness normalization” option but volume is just all over the place no matter what.

Of course these are specific to youtube and not essential for anyone who uses an alternative

Do you type with one hand?

And well even if you did you could hold down right shift instead of left shift to only use a single hand.

well if you’re using a mono font (terminal) then there are no such thing as wider characters anyway, so for me that’s not a drawback either

why not use underscores?

Does windows add an extra character at the end that gets converted to new line on linux? Because the other day I were copying a script and after pasting it an extra line was added after every single line, even the empty lines.

how it looked when I copied it:

bla
bla

bla

what it turned into:

bla

bla



bla
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

Ignoring unauthorized copying

… Bill Gates said “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

The practice allowed Microsoft to gain some dominance over the Chinese market and only then taking measures against unauthorized copies. In 2008, by means of the Windows update mechanism, a verification program called “Windows Genuine Advantage” (WGA) was downloaded and installed. When WGA detects that the copy of Windows is not genuine, it periodically turns the user’s screen black. This behavior angered users and generated complaints in China with a lawyer stating that “Microsoft uses its monopoly to bundle its updates with the validation programs and forces its users to verify the genuineness of their software”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

… the documents identified open-source software, and in particular the Linux operating system, as a major threat to Microsoft’s domination of the software industry, and suggested tactics Microsoft could use to disrupt the progress of open-source software.

NEXON…

assuming that you’re running WINE through the terminal you’ll see if there’s any error and usually it’s pretty simple to find what you need to make the game run (if it doesn’t already)

for starters get all the gst/gstreamer packages including the plugin ones (libav, good/bad/ugly, etc.) and make sure to have both 64 and 32bit versions.

get wine-mono (or directly install .net runtimes in your wineprefix, easily done with winetricks) and wine-gecko.

after that you basically just get whatever .dll or vcrun stuff as needed (following error messages), most easily done through winetricks

I will admit though, while using Linux Mint (instead of Arch Linux which I use on my home PC) at a relative’s house I had some trouble at first because a) apt package manager sucks, b) the names of the packages were different, and c) wine-mono and wine-gecko packages didn’t exist so I had to follow these instructions https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono & https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko

also just like how protondb is a really good resource to look up how well games will run on steam proton and tips on how to run them, there’s https://appdb.winehq.org/

just mount the .iso (if there is one) and run the installer (e.g. setup.exe) with WINE