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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • “We make a mess of things when we start lying.”

    It’s written in an older English style. Essentially it’s just the first one you’ve mentioned.

    The ‘first’ in the second half of the phrase isn’t relevant in current times but would have been common to include in sayings like this - it’s more noting that you have the intention of lying, not that you’ve found yourself doing so off the cuff.

    It’s like this: “if you are going out there to lie about something, this is going to go to shit”. Rather than, “this is going to shit because it’s the first time you’re lying”, that’s a far too literal take on older English.

    And for any non-native English speakers - ‘practice’ is the act of doing something, as opposed to ‘practise’ being learning/mastering through repetition.


  • It’s nothing special, it’s just what I like. I learned Linux using fluxbox, and later moved to Openbox because it was more feature complete. It’s a window manager, stacking-style, mouse-centric unlike Sway, i3, Hyprland, dwm etc.

    All config is done through a handwritten xml, but there exist gui tools to help edit/write all or parts of this for you.

    No panel by default, so you’ll need to find your own. You just right-click the desktop and you get a menu.

    It’s called a pipe menu, and it’s been nearly 20 years since I learned about it so I’ll do my best to remember how it works. The pipe menu dynamically changes as bash scripts are activated on mouse movement. So pointing at one thing in the menu would activate a script which triggers the next part of the menu to appear.

    The hook is that openbox and fluxbox are very fast and use very little system resources.

    Openbox is considered to be bug-free and hasn’t had any commits in nearly 10 years I believe. I think openbox is still being used in the lxqt suite, so maybe the default for Lubuntu? (if that’s still a thing!)


  • My only experience with a Fedora-based distro at all has been Bazzite that I had on a htpc for about 12 months, and the use case doesn’t really let me compare to Aeon. Similar to Aeon though, I had no problems with it during that time.

    I had Aurora on a thumbstick because I wanted to try it, but never got around to it.

    I was hoping something would happen with Kalpa, but I don’t believe anything will. I think if it was ever there, that with be best for me. I’ve moved to cachy OS mainly because I needed to get certain things working that were only packaged in appimage- BUT I believe I could have worked it out in Aeon by fiddling around with distrobox. I was going to test out Aurora for this and just stumbled into cachy OS instead.

    I’m not sure if I would go back to Aeon now, as I’m back on KDE again I don’t think I want to look at gnome for a while.

    But for my tastes, I think once there is a mature wayland-based Openbox replacement (eyes on labwc) I’d look around to see which distro works best with that. I’d imagine it could be Tumbleweed but I’d also watch how well it works on something extremely stable maybe Debian-based.

    Nothing is getting me really excited about Linux right now, not the way Ubuntu did in the 2000s, or how Crunchbang did, and not the way Tumbleweed did. Which is probably for the best because I don’t have time for tinkering or system maintenance, and that’s what makes the immutable distros shine.


  • I used Aeon myself from it being called microOS Desktop Gnome until around August of this year, it had replaced my old Tumbleweed install, and it had been rock solid the entire time. Absolutely loved it.

    It was everything I needed up to that point - wayland, automated updates and rollback, the default packages were spot on and super light, network config perfect out of the box (something I always struggle with), flatpak first! I’m a KDE user (well I’m really an Openbox guy but no wayland solution yet), so I suffered gnome for the sake of having a great system. I really like what Richard Brown has achieved, it’s almost perfect.

    You suspect right, my partner is not a tech user - Firefox, steam, libre office is pretty much it for her. When she shut down the night before this she had just been uploading photos to her cloud storage.

    I believe it was related to the implementation of full disk encryption. As this happened immediately after that policy was changed.

    after the ASUS UEFI splash screen; the screen goes black, it flashes up ‘Random seed file is too short’.

    Then it goes to a prompt:

    'Please enter recovery key for disk root-x86-64 (aeon_root): (press tab for no echo)

    I found the recovery key in my inbox, and in my partners sent files, as we knew it was probably important so she sent me a copy during installation. But when I put in the recovery key, let it go through the motions, it would restart and come back to this prompt. No amount of retrying the recovery key helped.

    I posted the error on the Aeon subreddit but after the recovery key wouldn’t work I just walked away from it. I couldn’t find any other mentions of this error anywhere, and the death of search engines has made this kind of thing difficult to chase down.

    With everything going on in our life I couldn’t troubleshoot this, I just needed her system up and I had Aurora ready on a thumbstick already.


  • It’s not mirror selection, it’s just not optimal compared to what Pacman is doing with parallel downloads.

    Downloading hundreds of tiny libxcxcxc.so one-by-one is painful. Since switching to pacman, I watch it download these, doing 10 packages at a time. 10 packages in 1 second versus zypper doing similarly sized 10 packages in ~10-15 seconds.

    I don’t need the mirror to be faster, I need zypper to handle more than one of these thousands of files at a time. Downloading a 100kb file at 15mb/s is no good to me when it’s stopping and starting 800 of them sequentially.

    And I only see the conversation go around in circles especially on zypper’s github.


  • I can’t say much because I don’t use it, but I put it on my partners computer after Aeon crapped itself and put the system in a boot loop until I switched the hard disk out.

    Her use case is simple- immutable, hassle free updates, and some games.

    She has no problems with it so far.

    I used it a little bit to back up an old hard drive, it’s just what I expected, a simple KDE implementation that isn’t messing about.

    But what I really hope it will be is no random breaking that takes the entire system out, (and to be fair to Aeon in that case - Aeon is still in release candidate).


  • I’ve been using it a few months and it’s been reliable. But in my mind, my use case, cachyos or endeavour could be interchangeable. I picked cachyos by chance because I was looking at Phoronix and they had just benchmarked it.

    I hadn’t used an Arch system since 2009 (except a brief stint with Manjaro around 2018 that ended in absolute disaster after about 2 weeks), so I was a bit skeptical about it.

    I like the default browser is pretty much a hardened Firefox. Good boot times. The packages I need were all there. It was easy to setup snapper. The little aesthetic changes cachyos made are nicely done.

    I’ve got a problem with port forwarding I can’t get working, never had that problem before and I don’t know network stuff well enough to figure it out.

    The updates are the winner for me- I don’t know how long this has been a thing with arch but downloading multiple packages at the same time. Game changer. I love Tumbleweed, but a 2gb “zypper dup” downloading package by package could take me 30 - 60 minutes.

    I mostly use flatpak, but I also needed to make use of some appimages and only 3 or 4 things I needed to install as system packages. So my Aeon install wasn’t working out for that and I wasn’t prepared to go back to tumbleweed.










  • I only see one person who questioned if you were trolling. And the response you’ve largely gotten are because people don’t agree with your point of view.

    It’s good to have advocates in positions of privilege. If we were all to rely on someone like yourself to try and change hearts and minds, how quickly and widespread can you move that message and get people to understand the plight of workers? Not as quickly as someone with privilege and influence who can help with that.

    I don’t know this guy or his politics, just examining this discussion and (as with the other responses you’ve gotten) not really sure where you’re coming from with this. You said yourself your co-workers listen to this guy all day, you can see that kind of thing is important right? (If it’s the right message he is pushing of course)



  • Yes of course. And if they go spend it on a pack of chips or coffee from the 7-11, that might be just what they needed to get through the next few hours.

    Only they know what they need right then and there, and I hope we’re past the condescension of people refusing to give money but offering some food item they believe the person would benefit from (because “if I give money they’ll just waste it”).

    Sometimes they might want to talk if you can spare some time too, to break the social exclusion they’re feeling.

    And they might not be appreciative, or they may have a as bad attitude, that’s the way it goes. They’re dispossessed, they’re looked down on, and they could be sleeping on the side of the road on a rainy night wondering how long they’ve got left. They may have lost families. They may not have it in them to say “thanks mate”.