Thanks, I’m checking that out, but can’t find any “add services” button. Alsp someone mentioned IONOS, which is local to me and doesn’t seem to have bandwidth limits… I was trying to find the poop and they require lots of personal info just to get the account setup, still a bit torn there.

That would be awesome, currently it’s 500GB for their cheaper option which starts at 23/year. I didn’t find an option to increase the bandwidth before completing the order. Also it needs to be deployed in NY (which would be possibly slow for me in Europe). Finally their isos are somewhat old, the latest Ubuntu they have is 20.04 (which has an EoL next year).

All that being said, 23/year is very cheap for a VPS, and for people in the US that use less than 500GB/month that’s the best deal I’ve ever seen.

Do you have an alternative to cloudflare tunnels? I’d love to hear it, because I’m also not really happy about relying on them either, but tailscale only works up to an extent because not all devices can connect to it and it’s a pain in the ass to get random family members to connect to it as well.

The mouse is Logitech, which afaik doesn’t have any issues (at least all of my Logitech mice have always just worked).

The drivers can impact performance worse on some games and cause glitches in others. I remember a while back getting some texture issues on Nvidia but not on nouveau (even though the performance was worse).

First of all nothing to apologize, no one should be forcing anyone to use any OS.

Secondly, you shouldn’t start with Arch, it’s a very manual process that has several small things that can be done wrong. I recommend you try Mint, Pop or any other beginner friendly distro, you can still tinker and customize them as much as you want, but you will be starting from something that works instead of having to build a working system from the ground up without knowing what that looks like.

That’s exactly the reason you shouldn’t recommend Arch for new users. New users, even those who like to tinker, don’t want to read pages upon pages of wikis to get basic shit working. They want something that works that they can tinker with.

90% sure OP installed the wrong drivers, probably because he missed some note on which to install or a configuration to switch them. Also very likely the mouse issue is related to some random udev rule or package he installed trying to solve something, Logitech mouses just work out of the box.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Arch, have been using it as my main distro for over 15 years, but it’s definitely NOT for new users, even those who like to tinker with their system, Ubuntu is just as tinkerable, but Arch you need to build up. Imagine someone saying they are interested in decorating their home and you recommend them to build their house from scratch while having nowhere to live. This is why it’s important that new users have a comfortable place they can go back if things don’t work, and if you don’t give it to them they’ll obviously return to Windows.

Linux at work and Linux for gaming are two very different beasts. For example, you didn’t mention which drivers and DE (or WM) you’re using which are the most crucial part to how games run, and both of which need to be manually configured on Arch but come pre-configured or are a couple clicks away in other distros.

For me self-hosted refers to #2. Many of us also have jobs that are either fully or partially related to #1, but I wouldn’t expect a #1 answer here. Questions here are usually directed to, and answered with, the #2 mentality.

They are very different things. If all of the places where you want to access the data have storage large enough to accommodate all of it syncthing is probably easier. If however you also want to access the data from your phone, then syncthing won’t work, because it will sync the entire folder to your phone, there’s no way to use it like you would Nextcloud, i.e. only downloading things as you need them.

100% this, the more you know about Linux the less you care about the distro. Realistically I use Arch because I’m lazy and the AUR and wiki are fantastic, but the company laptop came with Ubuntu and that’s what it will keep on running, I have servers running Debian, I’ve worked with devices running some flavor of Red hat, it’s all the same, and whenever I see someone trying to be elitist for running Arch I imagine a 15YO living in their mom’s basement thinking they’re cool because they managed to follow simple instructions.

One thing to note though is that SteamOS is immutable, i.e. / is blocked for writes by default, you can only write to /home, so you need to install things via flatpaks not via package manager. So not ideal for a power user, but should be enough for most people.

I disagree that Arch guys are the guy who tunes up everything, I think that would be Gentoo. I think Arch guys are the equivalent of the guy that built his own PC, it’s not an impressive feat (even though some act as if they were superiors for doing it) and probably lots of the people who buy prebuilts can do it, they chose not to bother assembling things if they can get someone to do it for them. The reason I think this is because I use Arch for the same reason I built my PC, i.e. I’m lazy and want something that might be a slight hoccup to setup but will be a breeze to maintain, it might be a Frankenstein, but it’s the Frankenstein I built and know.

That’s the one I use exactly because of that. I know compose, not going to learn another program to do the same, just want something that gives me an easier way to edit them than sshing into my box and using an editor.

Why not use Journal from Silverbullet since you already have it https://silverbullet.md/Library/Journal

You can just copy those templates and edit them as you wish, for example I have one for Stand-ups at work

As much as I would love that, don’t read too much into it, Valve has always pushed Linux fixes for all of their things (including VR)

I really miss Emily, hope she comes back soon, but I understand her wanting to be on her own for a while, but honestly her videos were the best ones always.

AMD no doubt. Back in 2017 AMD had recently open sourced their drivers I was in the market for a GPU, but you know the saying “fool me once shame on you”, AMD used to SUCK on Linux, people always seem to forget about it, so I chose an Nvidia. I don’t regret my choice, but over the years AMD proved that it had really changed, so my new GPU now is an AMD, and the experience is just so much better.

Today it might be a turning point, maybe Nvidia will change, maybe they’ll change their mind and fuck It up, they’ve done it in the past, so I wouldn’t buy an Nvidia just in case they do the right thing for once, AMD is already doing the right thing for years. Also if you go with Nvidia forget about Wayland, and every day more and more distros are going Wayland only, so if you go Nvidia you might find yourself holding a very expensive paperweight in a few years.

An Nvidia 3070 costs 420 and benchmarks at 22,403 (benchmark point per dollar 53.34) An AMD 6800 costs 360 and benchmarks at 22,309 (benchmark point per dollar 61.97)

So you get a 0.4% drop in performance for a 14.3% drop in price. That is significantly more performance per dollar.

Or if you go with a 3070ti ($500 23,661 -> 47.32) vs a 7800 XT ($500 23,998 -> 47.97) you get a 1.4% performance increase for free (not really that significant I know, but still it’s free performance)

All of the numbers were taken from https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Deck uses AMD

Are you versed in Linux though? If not I think going with Mint or another beginner friendly distro would be better.

That being said, if you are comfortable enough around Linux Arch is great, and the meme about being difficult probably stems from people who have no idea what they’re doing trying to install it. The installation is the most difficult party if you can spin up a VM and successfully install and run it there you’re good to go.

On the long run though I prefer Arch exactly because I’m lazy. Yes, installing it is a bit tedious, but if you know what you’re doing it’s 30 min of tedious stuff, then you get access to the lazy motherload, i.e. the Arch User Repository (the AUR essentially contains 99% of every software you might want to install but is not on the official repositories, so no looking for PPAs or downloading installers from random websites ever again), plus it’s a rolling release distro, so no more reinstallations or version upgrades that need lots of attention.

Overall I use Arch because I’m lazy, but you need to be comfortable around Linux for you to be able to be Lazy using Arch.

Sure, it’s quite simple:

xrandr --setmonitor LEFT 1720/1x1440/1+0+0 DP-0
xrandr --setmonitor RIGHT 1720/1x1440/1+1720+0 none
i3-msg reload

Essentially the first like tells it to only use a 1720x1440 starting at 0,0 area from the DP-0 screen. The second line creates a virtual monitor also with 1720x1440 but starting on 1720,0. The third line just reloads my WM so that it shows the bar at the top nicely.

Edit: obviously this only works if you’re running X11, but I’m sure that Wayland has something similar