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.
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?”
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.
It’s never perfect!
I have a temperature sensor in box here that I haven’t yet installed…hmmmmmwhere could I put it!
Actually if Shelly ever gets me the stuff I ordered IN NOVEMBER I would replace the one for the pellet stove with that…but last night I saw a Tuya Zigbee air quality monitor on Amazon for under $25 that would be even better…
Oh wait, I installed a Zigbee switch the other day but haven’t added the lights it controls to my floor plan view!
Oops, Plans changed, I guess I could update my home assistant while I wait.
The following 14 plugins are no longer configured by configuration.yml…
Eh, it’s just like Linux. Sometimes you just backup valuables. Scrap the whole thing and start from scratch again.
Personally, I’m loving the less YAML configs I have to do these days. Use to spends hours configuring it. I much prefer the click a button here and there and I’m done.
Getting old and lazy.
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?
That’s it, I’m setting up a LFS box and hostnaming it something garden-related, there’s always a package to be updated
You need a
.git
folder at the root of your system.Ostree 👾
… And Fedora Silverblue. Perfect for tinkering. I love how I can always install apps and remove them at my leisure, without leaving traces ;)
Once your system setup reaches perfection (it won’t), you’re finally free to fine-tune VIM to your exact needs.
Already done… but now I feel like I need to switch to Neovim… and now I have to research Neovim plugins and configs….
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻)
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. 🤦♂️
My system was configured perfectly one day, then I started vi and now I can’t exit. Send help.
If you are done configuring your system, you did something wrong.
Or you finally got a girlfriend.
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.
Yeah, get to a stable state and live there. No shame in using KDE/GNOME or even something as pedestrian as Ubuntu.
If you live on your computer for work, I get you tweaking stuff like every six months or so. Get that optimized workflow no matter how messy or chaotic it might look.
A weak mind. my linux config comes before my girlfriend!
Welcome to the dark side my friend.
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…
My cycles are more like Debian lts, hot dog linux.
I got past that phase a long time ago. I just use Fedora and Debian with mostly defaults
Same with Manjaro for me
You won’t believe this, but I’ve actually finished configuring my linux
There are things I believe. This is not one of those things.
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.
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
Ubuntu vps ftw
not believing intensifies
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.
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.
I hope you’re on a long LTS release my friend
I use arch btw
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.
emby and jellyfin
you need both of these things? Dont they both do exactly the same thing?
Lol the roku client for emby was annoying me, so I installed jellyfin just so I could use the jellyfin roku client. Which turns out to also be buggy and annoying. So now I’m running both and I’m tempted to install plex next.
I’m one of the programmers of the Jellyfin Roku client. Would you mind sharing what things you found to be buggy and annoying in the client? We’re always looking for feedback for things to work on and improve.
My main use case is that I watch a lot of tv shows, often while I am in bed going to sleep.
So I want the episodes to be labeled correctly in sequence, like season number and episode number. I want those numbers to be displayed correctly when I navigate episodes. When I pause it’ll stop the app, I want the correct season and episode to show up in the “Continue watching” list. And I want auto play to continue playing the next episode after the current episode completes.
I have found both emby and jellyfin to have issues with the above items.
Currently I’m running both. I find myself moving back to emby more often as it seems to handle the above cases better.
Oh yeah, you’re the person who asked to have the season and episode number added to the OSD. I completed that update and am waiting for the PR to be reviewed and merged.
I can’t say I’ve ever seen any showstoppers for the jellyfin Roku client, but I will say it seems rather inconsistent when using the media options menu after selecting a movie. Sometimes choosing a different video reverts to the default top choice when you hit play. Sometimes the audio selections don’t match up with the chosen video but rather a different video option, meaning any choice is the wrong choice. At one point I even got the client to say that AAC Stereo was both the chosen Video and Audio. It’s really hard to describe and never enough a nuisance to wade through the process of opening an issue.
I knew about the audio option not matching if you choose a different video option. In fact, we noted that in our release post: https://jellyfin.org/posts/roku-200#-tv-episode-version-support
The others I’ve not heard of before. If it every becomes a nuisance, please open a ticket so we can investigate.
Ah, I didn’t see that because I haven’t generated types for TV Shows yet. Only movies.
Thank you for the ongoing support!
My kernel is 3 commits behind… gotta rebuild 😹
When I am done configuring, I start tinkering!
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…,
*Laughs in Debian
apt hooks get in the way of your thinkering.
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.
I’m actually disappointed when I boot up and nothing is broken or needs maintenance.
That’s why I create new problems constantly
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.
But you still do the security patches right?
No. I also turn off all mitigations. I am a monster!
I mean if it’s a gapped system… 🫣
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!
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.
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?
Sounds like a cool idea. I will add it to my selfhost list.
I still rely on openai for my llm needs but soon I will evaluate more private and self hosted solutions.
There probably is. Though I myself use nano (root permissions) and vscode.
I can relate, and it hurts that I can.
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.
When you try to explain to people that ricing isn’t a means, it’s the end.
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.