dn42
We are there for over half a year now, yay. No major fuck-up in the recent time, no route hijackings (we were close though). Lemon and I have been working on remaking the current, gollum based wiki, to a wiki with static files, generated using Zola (like our websites c:). The current state is something we are quite happy with, now we just need to talk to the wider dn42 community to make layout changes, maybe a script that syncs commits between the gollum based wiki and the new one. We got some people who already said they would host the new wiki when we let it loose to the wider community, so that motivates lemon and me to finish the project.
Hobbies
There are a few new things I played around with, I want to share here.
Keyboard layouts
I have started to learn the neo2 (German) layout. I am still nowhere near close to properly knowing where all the letters are (and it probably doesn’t really help that I am typing this using qwertz right now). So there is still a lot of learning to do for me. But I have entered the curious situation that when I think too hard about where the letters are on qwertz, I start typing the neo letters. So I am currently neither completely fluent in qwertz or neo.
Racing
Racing, a curious hobby. It is super expensive, sim racing can be cheaper, but the really amazing and immersive rigs are also super, super expensive. I really want to go drive in a more serious competition than… against AI in Assetto Corsa, or my friends who are not really into racing at my local go-kart track. Sadly, even these small visits with friends are expensive. I don’t think I will ever drive something more serious than online Assetto Corsa lobbies, which, don’t get me wrong, can be amazing racing, but I want to go race in real life. But well, what do you want to do in such an expensive sport, sim racing still can be amazing. You have the chance to drive any car you want to, virtually.
Void Linux
I have entered: the void.
So yea, after using Gentoo for a while, I got tired of it (it was more temporary thing either way, but an interesting experience). Why did I choose Void? I wanted to try something new, and I have heard about Void being another minimalist distro, with the interesting catch of using runit instead of systemd or OpenRC. It also uses the XBPS package manager, which I really enjoy. Recently I have been a bit annoyed by how many packages are not in the Void Linux repos I would like to use. I am also not entirely happy with the way they organize their package repository. But overall Void still has a more welcoming community than other Linux distros, which I really enjoy.
My thoughts on tiling Wayland window manager
I am using sway, with waybar. Waybar is amazing, really customizable, lightweight, integrates well. Sway on the other hand is a project lead by two people who don’t want any community involvement, and just want to build something for themselves. This should be properly communicated and not lead to rude comments on issues with people requesting features. The window manager is also the compositor on Wayland, so the devs saying “we don’t want this in our compositor”, you can’t “just choose a different one” like on X, while keeping the WM. So I looked into different ones, since I wanted to find a more community driven one. There are two I looked into: river and hyprland.
River has an interesting concept, and a better environment than sway. But sadly, it didn’t entirely do what I wanted, which could also be down to me not spending enough time to really dig into how the configuration is done properly.
So then there is still hyprland, right? Yes there is. It looked amazing, so I was interested. It looked like what I wanted from a WM and compositor, but oh boy there is more than one issue I got with it. Firstly, it doesn’t even build on Void Linux, it depends on GCC 13, which has not been shipped yet because of compatibility issues with musl. Hyprland also depends on a specific version of wlroots, which means, you can’t use whatever version after version x is in your distros repos. My biggest issue though are the devs and their communication. In my opinion, it’s even worse than with sway. So with all of this, I didn’t even have the opportunity to try hyprland.
What am I using now? I am continuing to use sway at the moment. I don’t see any project that can do what I want from a window manager and compositor with an environment I want to open an issue in, without the fear of being rudely rejected.
School
Ah yes, the dreaded topic. School is an interesting place. I am not doing too well there. With me being more introverted and insecure about myself, I don’t speak a lot in class, so I am ruining half my grade by that. This system sucks in my eyes. The other issue I got, which is more on me, is that I am not learning for exams, ruining my grades even more. I am just not in a great place to finish school this year. I need to pick myself up from this somehow and start to learn how to properly learn.