the perfect efficiency

I saw a post on the Mastodony side of Fediverse saying "Some people tweak their Linux installs in the same way other people tend to their home gardens" and it gave me 2d6 of psychic damage because it was just true and was also about me.

I don't even hop distros, I just like fucking around with the configs and shit of the distro I'm already at. It's -- How I procrastinate. Rather than do work I play around with reorganizing my work setup.

88

Get into Home Assistant. A whole new world of tinkering and reconfiguring, with the added stress of real world "Why didn't that extremely complex automation controlling my porch lights work?"

35
- Job site got canceled, away from home, nothing else to do. Spent the last few hours cleaning up and "perfecting" my Home Assistant. I'm sure I'll do it again in a few days.
  
  8
- I have a pi docker setup I could run it on...... Don't tell me that 😂
  
  Is there a list somewhere of HA friendly less proprietary...... Stuff that works well with it?
  
  0
You need a .git folder at the root of your system.

3
- Ostree 👾
  
  2
I read that as a good thing. Buff acquired.

3
That's it, I'm setting up a LFS box and hostnaming it something garden-related, there's always a package to be updated

2

You won't believe this, but I've actually finished configuring my linux

42

There are things I believe. This is not one of those things.

30
not believing intensifies

21
15
that's the moment you're supposed to change distro.

12
I already finished 10 times. And I probably will be doing 10 times again.

Except you count a windows vm with gpu-passthrough then I am still on it.

10
I run my emby and jellyfin server, my desktop, printer server, plus a bunch of other shit I can’t think of right now.

If any of that shit doesn’t work, I will be annoyed. So I’m certainly not tinkering with it all the time.

4
- emby and jellyfin
  
  you need both of these things? Dont they both do exactly the same thing?
  
  3
I hope you’re on a long LTS release my friend

3
- I use arch btw
  
  1
Fine

But is your config standards-compliant and linted?

Does it degrade gracefully enough that you can load it on 1980s Unices and what is possible to load will load? Without emitting error messages??

I used to just crastinate but now I’m a pro.

3
Yeah, I used to reconfigure things quite a lot while I was still a student. Now with a dayjob, I'm glad if I can just use my laptop to get actual things done. Having previously figured out a really good setup, is very helpful in getting things done, though.

3
Time to get a VPS my friend, and figure out what needs to be hosted at home and on the VPS, and make things sync wherever required, and perfect your VPS with the right distro

2
- Ubuntu vps ftw
  
  2

Once your system setup reaches perfection (it won't), you're finally free to fine-tune VIM to your exact needs.

33

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)

4
Already done… but now I feel like I need to switch to Neovim… and now I have to research Neovim plugins and configs….

4
god damn it! I was about to say that I'm done configuring after decades and can finally be productive, then I saw your comment. 🤦‍♂️

3
My system was configured perfectly one day, then I started vi and now I can’t exit. Send help.

1

When I am done configuring, I start tinkering!

31

Yes.

I'm mostly finished ricing, everything works, but every now and then i find something I want to improve or try out.

Well there are still some things I want to implement, like adding smart window transparency to swayfx, but that is kind of a mammoth task, while I can't even get it to compile properly..,

2

*Laughs in Debian

31

apt hooks get in the way of your thinkering.

6
- Debian will slap you every time you decide to do some deep tinkering, so you develop healthy pavlovian reflexes.
  
  It's the only way to have enough free time to organize my drawers in gridfinity boxes.
  
  7

If you are done configuring your system, you did something wrong.

28

Or you finally got a girlfriend.

23
- Pretty much. After I got married and started having kids I just want a PC setup that just works when I want to do anything on it. Without needing to troubleshoot some esoteric issue because apparently my motherboard is on a different revision version that changes the WiFi card to use some shit ass MediaTek card ONLY for that revision and now I can't use WiFi or Bluetooth and I need to troubleshoot the issue for hours.
  
  4
- A weak mind. my linux config comes before my girlfriend!
  
  4

I'm actually disappointed when I boot up and nothing is broken or needs maintenance.

22

That's why I create new problems constantly

7

me with (neo)vim

18

Every time I spend four hours figuring out how to get one tiny little thing working better in vim I find another even smaller issue that I desperately need to dig in to, and thus my actual personal projects never get worked on. I should just give up and call "tweaking my vimrc" a hobby.

10

Problem I have, is, after I finish tinkering and settle down with my computer for some days/months, then even anything needs fixing or changing I've forgotten how I do it!

17

Now you have got a good excuse to setup something to manage your knowledge base.

I recommend markdown:

frequently_encountered_issues.md

lots of helper scripts scripts

Setup guides mostly taken from their respective arch wiki pages but stripped down to only show my custom setup

a markdown file per os per machine

etc

Also link back to the original resources. Still copy them though. The internet is temporary.
3
- I have a collection of org-mode files and plain text. Moved more to markdown but not for my setup notes yet. But it's still a lot of brain work to match the pieces together and remember what matters.
  
  Now, I neat idea I heard recently: run a local llm that can index your own notes. I don't know how easy that is. There's an Emacs mode for that, right?
  
  1
I can relate, and it hurts that I can.

2

My kernel is 3 commits behind... gotta rebuild 😹

15

It never stops. Distro hopping is an addiction for me.

15

You should see a hanna montana asap before it gets incurable.

4

I've finally stopped distrohopping. I'm now on nobara (used arch before that btw), and don't feel the urge, nor have the energy to distrohop, even though I want to find out what's so great about nix. That said, I still only use my computer for movies, games, and browsing, so I guess the meme still stands.

11

Same. I want to try NixOS, or immutable distros, or a fully containerized system, and I've been meaning to give Gentoo a shot for years as well (I'm not suffering enough on Endeavor, btw). I even got a second drive just so I don't have to throw my current setup away, but I'm just so comfy and everything just works and it'll be so much work to actually give a new system a fair shot.

4
Is nobara better then mint? This is someone with little Linux knowledge who is on windows 10 but refuses to use 11

2
- Personally I prefer a rolling release or at least a bleeding edge distro, so nobara works great for me. If your laptop or computer has any latest components that are not already supported in the lts kernel, then you can try nobara, but if not, you can use mint with no issues. I would even say mint is the best starting point to Linux coming from Windows. It has all necessary things configured and ready to go, including automatic backups of the system for recovery purposes.
  
  1

Oh no...

This is like me with game mods (skyrim). Spent 20 hours modding it just right... spend 10 hours in character creation and more mods for that... move on to another game.

11

When you try to explain to people that ricing isn't a means, it's the end.

10

A new long term release? I'll just start over and try every DE again.

9

I already use it efficiently to configure more stuff.

7

Nah, it's cyclical. We can figure one for a few years, then try out a new promising distro then we can figure that one for a few years...

6

My cycles are more like Debian lts, hot dog linux.

1

I got past that phase a long time ago. I just use Fedora and Debian with mostly defaults

6

Same with Manjaro for me

2

That yak ain't gonna shave itself

3

I've used gentoo in my home for 23 years now. The good news is I'm down to system rebuilds once every 18 months or so.

3

But you still do the security patches right?

1
- No. I also turn off all mitigations. I am a monster!
  
  2

I used to be him, missing deadlines to get my xmonad taskbar all spec'd out. Now only "hop" when my LTS is EOL, and i just run the default UI and use tmux for all my tiling since i tend to be mainly on remote systems anyway.

3

Considering how often I'll dig around in my old elisp files before giving up on using emacs again, I think I've actually spent more time configuring it than using it.

3

Oh, so you're the person in this video!

Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023 [Colorized] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc / https://yewtu.be/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc

5
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  https://www.piped.video/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
  3
- 🤣 but also wow that is a lot of emacs jokes!
  
  3

This reminds me of the eMacs interview

2

And that's the point of configuring.

1

Currently in the process of getting my ducks in a row to move to a different distro. The one on my computer right now has some shortcomings that I just can't look past. I need to scan something, and Manjaro can't build the driver I need. Manjaro has been sadness and disappointment, both times that I've tried it. Don't use Manjaro.

1

I've recently switched completely to Linux on my desktop. I'm waiting with configuration and theming and so on until KDE 6 is fully released. On the one hand it's annoying because I WANT to get to it, but luckily the defaults are very good already, so it's not too bad!

1

Ouch

1

There are things I believe. This is not one of those things.

1