A typical bike-riding leftist urbanite who also happens to be a hockey-crazy Western Canadian.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • A really common issue with sway is that it doesn’t run as a login shell, so none of your .profile or other environment settings get sourced when you login. I think that might be the problem here.

    Try closing your sway session, then login to a tty and run sway. If the qt themes work properly then it’s definitely an environment issue.


  • Fellow Arch user here (btw). It’s exactly the same as building AUR packages. Clone a git repo containing a PKGBUILD, use makepkg to build it, and pacman to install it. The nice thing is you can host a repo of your built packages and install them on other systems really easily. The big downside is that dependency management is not automated, so it will take some time and annoyance to map out what packages you need to build and in what order, if you want a fully source-bootstrapped system.













  • The only difference between those two versions of linux is that the new one was built with a newer version of gcc. That doesn’t really narrow the problem down, though. As far as I’m aware, emergency mode is caused by either a kernel panic or a failure to mount a needed filesystem. I’m leaning towards a corrupted kernel, since it doesn’t sound like you changed your fstab or had any problem mounting /. I would run fsck -f on your boot partition, then try to re-download and reinstall the new package.

    If that doesn’t work, then you can add IgnorePkg = linux linux-headers to pacman.conf so you can update without installing the broken package, until you resolve the underlying issue. Or your can install a different kernel altogether.

    As for preventing problems in the future, there’s only so much you can do. Check archlinux.org before updating to see if anything requires manual intervention, and pay close attention while running pacman in case something goes wrong. You already seem to know the most important part, which is to keep a set of packages that are certain to work, so you can easily downgrade if a crash does happen.


  • I decided to switch when windows xp went end-of-life, because my pc was a mid-2000’s era relic that would surely catch fire if it was forced to handle the windows 7/10 bloat. Naturally, I installed Mint on bare metal without doing any research beforehand. Not the best idea, but sometimes it’s fun to jump headfirst into a completely foreign landscape. That said, Cinnamon (the desktop environment of Mint) shares much of its design language with windows, so it’s not really that foreign, as far as the graphical interface is concerned.

    What surprised me was just how different the underlying system was, how much more transparent and accessible it was, and how incredibly efficient and versatile the command line could be. Then there’s the broader OSS community, which I think is a fantastic thing to participate in even if you don’t use Linux, but using Linux is certainly a gateway.

    I’m not saying Linux is perfect, and it’s probably not for everyone, but it is nice to not be held captive by some monopolistic corporation, who continuously engages in ethically questionable anti-consumer behaviour, in the name of increasingly monetizing their user base. Linux gives power back to the end users, and that’s what makes it worthwhile and important.