i've been using arch as my daily driver for 4 years. but i am thinking of switching to chimera linux. i really like apk, i think using dinit, llvm, musl and *bsd core utils would be great. for server, i use proxmox as my hypervisor, and debian for most vm's, starting to use alpine on lxc. I am using openwrt on my router.

River scratches the itch for me of hyper minimal. The config file is just a script/executable, it can be written in any language, but by default it's bash. in 0.4 (which should be coming out soon) they are coming out with a custom protocol to separate the window manager, and the compositor--so river will just handle the lower level/compositor things, and it can be a lot more simple to write a custom window manager. For example, KWM's first commit was Dec 25 2025 if I remember correctly; and the river wiki already lists 13 wm's that work with river as the compositor. I saw yalter say that things like animations etc will be more complicated with this model; but for me personally, i pretty much always shut off animations. also rivers community seems pretty good, and their code of conduct is solid.

I saw one of your previous comments about how you appreciate the unix philosophy of “do one thing best”, i found niri kinda rubbed me weird when things like screenshot, overview, recent apps were built in--while very useful for a "just works" desktop, and it makes niri a compositor that i would recommend to my friends, it makes niri feel like a bit of a wrong fit for me; have you felt this at all?

I also find with scrolling, I sometimes lose track of my windows, I wrote a script to display how many columns are in the current workspace, and which column is currently active--this helped a bit... but after 3-4 months of using niri i'm not 100% sold.

ya but for me it was easier to mentally map ctrl-b + key for remote, ctrl-n + key for local. also sometimes i'll use the prefix, then change my mind and esc out, and with the whole double prefix thing it broke my brain. everyone is different though lol maybe that was a bad protip.

some benefits to using tmux,

• When you switch terminal emulators your workflow and keybinds come with you.
• If you need to operate within a tty, you can still use tmux and it feels almost like using a wm but without a gui.
  • useful if you need to drop out of your desktop environment or maybe your DE/WM/compositor fails to load.
  • also if you DE/WM/compositor crashes, your terminal doesn't go with it.
• If you ever end up working on servers it's so nice to be able to have the same workflow that you already use on desktop.
• tmux in my experience is much more scriptable.
• running system updates in tmux scares me less--if i accidently close the running terminal window i won't end up with a partial update.

One pro tip: on your local machine, set the tmux prefix to (instead of ), that way when you're using tmux on a remote server you can run tmux on the remote as well as on your local and the binds don't conflict.

unbind C-b
set-option -g prefix C-n

baby steps though. don't rush into things. don't even worry about what i said... just learn to use man and --help (and/or install tldr) keep building on the knowledge you have as you go; and don't be afraid to jump in when something interests you. good luck friend!

exactly, and jellyfin truly did just work... i procrastinated a long time on setting up navidrome, but it has also mostly just worked. it's been nice that they can both point at the same nfs share. navidrome very explicitly operates in a read only fashion.

thanks for the suggestion! I did notice tempo hadn't gotten updates in a while... I will switch it out for tempus!

I think most of this works for me in zsh. But also tmux can help with selection; I believe by default you use your prefix then open bracket (Ctrl-b + [) to put your self in selection mode. I have some configs to use vim bindings in selection mode.

Tmux selection:

# Yanking
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi v send-keys -X begin-selection
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi C-v send-keys -X rectangle-toggle
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-selection-and-cancel

zsh keybinding:

# Key Bindings
# set vim mode
bindkey -v

# create a zkbd compatible hash;
# to add other keys to this hash, see: man 5 terminfo
typeset -g -A key

key[Home]="${terminfo[khome]}"
key[End]="${terminfo[kend]}"
key[Insert]="${terminfo[kich1]}"
key[Backspace]="${terminfo[kbs]}"
key[Delete]="${terminfo[kdch1]}"
key[Up]="${terminfo[kcuu1]}"
key[Down]="${terminfo[kcud1]}"
key[Left]="${terminfo[kcub1]}"
key[Right]="${terminfo[kcuf1]}"
key[PageUp]="${terminfo[kpp]}"
key[PageDown]="${terminfo[knp]}"
key[Shift-Tab]="${terminfo[kcbt]}"

# setup key accordingly
[[ -n "${key[Home]}"      ]] && bindkey -- "${key[Home]}"       beginning-of-line
[[ -n "${key[End]}"       ]] && bindkey -- "${key[End]}"        end-of-line
[[ -n "${key[Insert]}"    ]] && bindkey -- "${key[Insert]}"     overwrite-mode
[[ -n "${key[Backspace]}" ]] && bindkey -- "${key[Backspace]}"  backward-delete-char
[[ -n "${key[Delete]}"    ]] && bindkey -- "${key[Delete]}"     delete-char
[[ -n "${key[Up]}"        ]] && bindkey -- "${key[Up]}"         up-line-or-history
[[ -n "${key[Down]}"      ]] && bindkey -- "${key[Down]}"       down-line-or-history
[[ -n "${key[Left]}"      ]] && bindkey -- "${key[Left]}"       backward-char
[[ -n "${key[Right]}"     ]] && bindkey -- "${key[Right]}"      forward-char
[[ -n "${key[PageUp]}"    ]] && bindkey -- "${key[PageUp]}"     beginning-of-buffer-or-history
[[ -n "${key[PageDown]}"  ]] && bindkey -- "${key[PageDown]}"   end-of-buffer-or-history
[[ -n "${key[Shift-Tab]}" ]] && bindkey -- "${key[Shift-Tab]}"  reverse-menu-complete

# Finally, make sure the terminal is in application mode, when zle is
# active. Only then are the values from $terminfo valid.
if (( ${+terminfo[smkx]} && ${+terminfo[rmkx]} )); then
	autoload -Uz add-zle-hook-widget
	function zle_application_mode_start { echoti smkx }
	function zle_application_mode_stop { echoti rmkx }
	add-zle-hook-widget -Uz zle-line-init zle_application_mode_start
	add-zle-hook-widget -Uz zle-line-finish zle_application_mode_stop
fi


# History - use current line up to cursor to search through history with arrow keys
autoload -Uz up-line-or-beginning-search down-line-or-beginning-search
zle -N up-line-or-beginning-search
zle -N down-line-or-beginning-search

[[ -n "${key[Up]}"   ]] && bindkey -- "${key[Up]}"   up-line-or-beginning-search
[[ -n "${key[Down]}" ]] && bindkey -- "${key[Down]}" down-line-or-beginning-search

I recommend giving the manual install a whirl... it might take you a couple tries, but it will help with your overall understanding of your system--this will be useful if anything ever goes sideways. It really isn't that hard. What you learn during install (how to read the wiki effectively, partitioning layouts, how to set up a boot loader, what filesystems are available and how they're different, what you need to install for firmware or build tools etc etc) will help demystify the system, and put the power to manage your system in your hands. Also if you ever run into an issue like your /boot or / partition being full and you want to resize your partitions, or your compositor won't launch/is freezing and you need to use a TTY--you'll be better equipped... even if that means you're just a bit better at reading/searching the wiki.

sorry if my reply seemed too negative towards you. I was mostly curious about the issues you had and sorting them out... It's good you enjoy it! like I said, I think for specific people... these types of issues are much more interesting than dealing with issues that come with other platforms.

I wonder if your system update/hyprland issue was when they moved away from wlroots?

AUR isn't really recommended. Because it's managed by users, you're essentially running install scripts that may or may not be maintained by randos (of course, i'm simplifying--but i think this is a fair way to look at it). Personally, if possible I'll always choose flatpak > AUR--and AUR only when necessary. That being said, I do install from the AUR, and I love that it exists and is available... I just avoid it when possible.

Updating once a year is rough. But even then with your issues, imo i'd weigh those to how difficult a windows update for 10 -> 11 or going from Debian 12 -> 13... If I was only using my computer once a month or so, I'd likely run Debian. But I do have a second laptop that I rarely use, but it runs arch with DWM and almost nothing else GUI besides a web browser and "it just works"... even after a month or so there isn't much to updated, cause it only has like 500 or packages installed lol

if you haven't already, i recommend maybe trying to set up a systemd timer for refreshing reflector? I run it manually whenever I find that downloading updates is slow or fails... in the past I had a bash script in my $PATH called update.sh that would run reflector, run yay, and then update flatpak (I put it in my $PATH, because at the time I was testing the water with different shells, and didn't want to have to update .bashrc, .zshrc and fish config etc).

bummer that you've had issues with arch. but i don't really understand the issues you've had. like setting up reflector should solve the mirrors, and checking the newsfeed before updating will solve a lot of other issues. In the last year I think there was only one, maybe two times that there was manual intervention required from me--and they were both trivial; and the convenience of never having to worry about doing a distro upgrade is so nice... Other than that, hyprland is changing frequently so sometimes you need to update your config--but again, just read the release notes or use a wm that updates less (like sway, dwm). But the changes have never taken more than 20 seconds to fix, and they've never been breaking for me. Maybe some of your issues were due to the DDOS attacks that have been going on? Also how much do you use the AUR?

My take on Arch after almost a year is that you have to either be super good at Linux, or be nerdy enough to waste time on Linux nonsense and menial maintenance tasks.

while i think this is overstated, i do agree that you need to be a certain kind of person to enjoy arch.

true. but in my experience, most code redemption downloads don't require info though... besides the usual collection of your data via fingerprinting and cookies.

where do you source most of your music? for music i really only pirate large artists/bands, so torrenting is pretty easy. i haven't bothered with soulseek--a centralized network doesn't appeal that much, and i'm not desperate. if i really need something, and can't find it, i just use yt-dlp.

this sounds nasty... how recent? i haven't experienced any issues using calibre to strip drm and back up books from my kobos. works for library books from overdrive/libby as well. from my cursory glance, it seems like they have been using ADE linkfiles for this for a while? But maybe I didn't look closely enough.

I love my kobo so much, and I love being able to own my digitial books, keep back ups and not have to deal with DRM (once removed lmao).