Linux on A Collection of Thoughts

It was a freaking journey this weekend!

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:20:45 -0500

I had all the unearned confidence of a person who has relatively few problems on Linux (aside from the weird ones like Foot Terminal of late). I thought to myself: Damn, I could install FreeBSD on my Laptop on the Side, which takes all the random installs that won’t go on my main desktop. It would totally be fine and not weird (for most, this would be a mere short side quest). Oh boy, I didn’t even get past bsdinstall because something was off with that despite checking the checksum, writing it to a USB using DD+Sync flag so I knew when it was finished. The keymap was fucked, duplicated a lot of my inputs by several keystrokes with a single press. Didn’t want to allow me to correctly select the required installation categories (with the keyboard shortcut), couldn’t access the network configuration tool either so nothing could be done at all. Misfortune looked over my shoulder that day and said, “Nope, isn’t happening buddy.” FreeBSD, for now is out of my reach, thankfully my Solus install wasn’t messed with due to FreeBSD respecting my settings until I commit to the changes.

Since I’ve been working on buffing myself with knowledge…I am in the early beginner phase of learning C programming. I decided that Code::Blocks wasn’t cutting it and I wanted to try Eclipse IDE. Now, I had successfully set it up on Garuda Linux, with a home folder with my tester C file that I practice lessons with (in this case, I am working on Arrays). To get build and run working, to tell me the code output, I needed to set-up that folder with a Debug launch config. That worked the second I read my options and fields, figuring out what was necessary. Garuda Linux is goated in that sense, it seems to just work and not pose me a lot of problems.

However, Solus, I tinkered well into the night with that distro and couldn’t get Eclipse IDE to work at all. Despite following the same actions that I did on Garuda:

Set the default Workspace for Eclipse IDE to use.
Install the Eclipse C/C++ Plugins necessary to make my testing project work.
Create a C/C++ Folder and put a C File in there.
Set up a Debug Launch Configuration that would print code outputs in the console, so I knew if it worked or not. Also, it would highlight any errors that were present.

Having enough of these problems, I thought to install Fedora Sway Spin (not Atomic). Got that thing up and running pretty quickly, however, the same issues were present. I was instructed to use dnf install commands to get a lot of the libraries that Eclipse IDE provided themselves installed before running it. I did, couldn’t reproduce the success that I had with my Garuda Linux install. “Unusual behavior”, I thought to myself as I looked at the clock and noticed it was nearly 5:00AM. I had done a lot of set-up, research, installing, troubleshooting on my laptop. It was late and yet, I didn’t have my fill of it yet! I still tinkered away trying other C IDE programs to figure out what would be best. In the end, I said fuck it, put Garuda Linux, Mocha Edition on a USB for first thing in the afternoon as I had ended up going to bed at 7:00AM this morning.

Still took me a few hours to get this install set-up as the Garuda Linux Toolbox missed some shit, I had to use Octopi to install all of my software like: Discover, Mullvad Browser+Mullvad VPN, Distrobox, Eclipse IDE. From there I used Distroshelf to create a Fedora container (delicious irony) to install the following within it: Proton Pass, Filen, and Bibisco. The two flatpaks I installed so far was Gear Lever and Distroshelf. I plan on keeping my laptop pretty minimal, since it won’t need too much stuff like my desktop. Everything else will come from the Extra, Core, or ChaoticAUR going forward only if there is a real need for it. The recent AUR Malware Attacks are a reminder to only install what you need! There are scripts that can help you detect if you might have compromised AUR packages on your machine, but the attackers are watching them and planning around them.

Naturally, Eclipse IDE worked flawlessly when I replicated the same steps that I followed on my desktop. What a surprise, looks like Garuda Linux has me less afraid of Arch now. Before, I’d have been quaking in my boots. Now, I just do shit and enjoy it for the most part (thinking first and researching before doing, in case said action isn’t necessary). Garuda Linux has become my ride or die, enough that I donate monthly to their OpenCollective.

Now, I am going to finish my laundry and enjoy a video game, because touching computers for configuration purposes is simply out of the question!

The Laptop Shenanigans because this Goose was let Loose!

Sat, 30 May 2026 14:51:30 -0500

Since my last post about solving the Foot Terminal Curse…I had been on a journey with my Laptop. I literally decided to go on a spree of trying a variety of different Linux distros that might’ve worked in for me and my personal workflow. However, unfortunately, a lot of them were not right for me in the moment. As either my brain could not cope with the workflow (as right now, my skill level is middling at best). Here’s a list, human written because I hate AI Listicles. Fuck AI! I won’t include all the Fedora Atomic distro experiments, they had no real problems…Just worked, I wanted to something else.

KaOS: I really like the idea of this distro abandoning KDE, but still sticking with QT by adopting Niri+Noctalia shell! This Linux distro is more for those that are keen on tinkering with programs as the repo is quite limited. However, they do support Flatpak which means you aren’t constrained to a purely tinkering experience. The default package manager is Pacman because it is quite ubiquitous in the Linux space. Now I may have experienced a bug, but the Live ISO installation flow did not work successfully for me as I ended up with a non-booting system. It may be that this is the kind of distro that requires pre-configuration of storage partitions and the like. It seemed like the standard Fedora Graphical Installer that would be able to handle all of that and end with having a bootable system at the end. Alas, I might try them out at a later date.
Nitrux: This is a beautiful immutable distro that doesn’t depend on systemd. I honestly wanted to love Nitrux, however, for the life of me I could not get Distrobox/shelf to work. Despite installing the Konsole and Ptyxis terminal via Flatpak. Normally this would’ve worked for me. However, I could not get Distroshelf to connect correctly to either of the terminals which normally work on other immutable distros. I had not enough sleep to diagnose the issues which were happening on this distro and I decided to scuttle this installation. As the distro wasn’t going to work for me personally, my mind wasn’t designed to utilize the power of Nitrux at the moment. I will be keeping Nitrux in mind for the future, when I am mentally prepared to engage with how it works and be adapted to the workflow asked of me.
Solus: Solus, it is a distro that I tried before. My first and second try of the KDE version it took me less than 10 minutes to get it installed as the installer is stupid fast. Solus is a rolling release distro that has a sane update schedule of a weekly sync every Friday. Sometimes this sync is big or it is particularly small to the point of being a singular change! This distro has all the major WMs that you could desire, sane defaults out of the box, one time MOK configuration (set and fucking forget forever), a decent software repo. I have to say, I love their built from the ground up package manager, eopkg. That little guy is speedy as fuck, even big updates takes a mere 4 minutes based on download speeds (mine are pretty good) it also displays all the steps it is taking when downloading and installing. If there are errors you can clearly tell, as successes, failures, downloads are all color coded for easy visual parsing. Distrobox and the graphical Distroshelf work flawlessly on the KDE version of Solus.

Solus is a labor of love and their passion shows in how well this distro performs on my hardware and how well it is built. I love them so much that I donate here as if we can, we should support the open source projects we love! Ultimately, I will likely stick with Solus for a long time because it just fucking works. It’s lovely, approachable nature makes it easy to love. Fills a space that Ubuntu once did before Canonical began to huff Microsoft’s miasma and warped into something very cursed.

Having said all of this…I might still experiment with Gentoo as comfort, who fucking needs it?! I like a little torment with my open source projects. It would be a massive undertaking, but given the laptop is fairly modern, it wouldn’t take long for it to compile Gentoo. LMAO I wish that I could settle and just enjoy my two mains: Garuda Linux on the Desktop and Solus on my Laptop.

Foot terminal no longer haunts me on Garuda Linux, includes original issue and edited resolution.

Wed, 06 May 2026 21:29:30 -0500

Edit: I will leave my inital issue below, however, I have figured out a solution: First, simply uninstall Foot terminal. As Alacritty is apparently plugged into Fish and Neofetch already, but Foot is considered the default terminal for auto-runs of both Fish and Neofetch. I also found out that Ptyxis (installed as a flatpak) enjoys auto-runs of Fish and Neofetch, I only use that for Distrobox…Still, quite nice! I did break pacseek because I uninstalled Foot, however, I do use either Garuda Toolbox or garuda-update to install system updates. This isn’t a huge problem for me!

No need to switch now, and I am a very happy man. This was a case of “fire out of ice, think, think”!

Original Post: I’m still enjoying Garuda Sway quite a bit; it’s a lovely and functional WM that makes my laptop experience a speedy and undistracting one. Save for a single issue. Foot terminal acts so fucking weird, it displays a “depreciated: foot: [colors] : use [colors-dark] instead” for 19 lines. Which is honestly insane default behavior, I don’t understand it, and this is an aesthetics nightmare. Foot is nice because it is very minimal and generally plays well with WM based on Wayland…However, I simply cannot stand that weird ass message that gets printed 19 times. I see it every time I use Pacseek or Garuda Toolbox, both of which are brilliant tools that make managing my laptop super easy! Its a shame that these a simple aesthetics issues marrs my experience with the Garuda Sway.

I did make a post on the Garuda Linux forum, so I will get it fixed eventually…if nobody answers, I’ll just switch my distro. As none of these people are getting paid to deal with petty user problems like mine. As a grown ass man, it costs me nothing to figure out an alternative distro. I have plenty of options. Probably going to return to SolusOS and rock a Niri WM because they recently added everything necessary to make a user friendly Niri set-up out of the box. Batteries included is always a wonderful thing!

#Linux #GarudaSway

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:48:08 -0500

Honestly, I am loving Garuda Linux so much. It’s so easy to get acquainted with Arch Linux using Garuda’s customizations. For the first time, I feel comfortable with Arch and that is a good thing. As eventually, I will install Arch as the Penguin Priest ordained: with archinstall.