magda

25. [email protected]

Oh boy, this may cause some drama.

Since mid-2021, I use the distribution that its known for its annoying “I use Arch btw” meme. “Annoying”, as you often can tell that they don't actually use it in an “ironic” way, despite claiming so. I installed Arch via Archcraft, slowly stripped it off its Archcraft-specific repos and packages (only keeping a few for testing purposes), and largely called it a day. While Archcraft shipped with some defaults that go against what “vanilla Arch” is preaching, Arch itself appears to be guilty of the very same sins it denounces.

My main issue largely focuses on the people behind Arch due to being the root of my recent hiccups with the OS, makepkg.conf now being automatically overwritten to make the work of a single, non-Arch dev “easier”, the stark contrast between Arch Wiki pages and its very few contributors and huge gaps in editing histories, the Arch forum pretty much being dominated by less than a handful of users, and the rather-old GRUB debacle that affected children of Arch and any Arch user using GRUB, which initially was treated as a non-issue because one out of the two Arch testers claimed “works for me” and thus resulted in the issue being addressed four days AFTER the outcry.

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Not really satisfied with the pre-configured bspwm session that was shipped with Archcraft, I decided to get familar with other window managers that may provide me a simple fallback solution to my main session running Openbox. As much as I tried to give i3wm yet-another-fair chance, I just can't warm up to it, so I eventually settled with a cousin of Openbox, namenly Fluxbox.

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Yes, this blog is supposed to be receiving extended stuff on matters that occupy my head for longer than they should, now that I turned my back on distribution reviews and commenting on recent tech dramas (and I've always been fully aware that no one is reading any of this and I'm perfectly fine with it). Funny enough, this also killed my motivation to blog and I've been spending my time experimenting with DOSBox-X, studying legacy malware, and finally fixing some annoying configurations of my main OS.

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After the disappointing “Practical C” published by O'Reilly in 2005 and the realization that the Technical University roughly an hour away from me doesn't put any emphasis on IT at all (no shit, most of their courses are targeting communication, media, and economics students, while the few electrical and electro-technical courses jump straight from mechanical engineering (!) to a tinsy bit of Java in practice!), I put my last hope on Wikiversity to close remaining knowledge holes.

By Zeus, you've got to be kidding me!

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The first computer my family owned was a heavy Fujitsu tower built in 2001 that came pre-installed with the operating system that many users fondly remember: Windows XP. For some reason, however, I wasn't that fond of XP when using it as a child, partially because it ran without an internet connection and also due to its very colorful desktop environment “Luna”, which was noticeably different from the design I became familiar with, namely that of Windows 95/98, which ran on my grandparents' PC.

As our machine could not receive any Service Pack updates due to lacking internet access, this computer remained with the very first version of Windows XP until the OS eventually bricked itself.

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Right, I am either attracting incels like flies or I simply tend to spot them easier when browsing the web. Regardless of what specifically applies – and there's already no doubt that I do attract incels more often I can tolerate – and what else is a driving force behind this, there are quite a lot within the tech sphere. Perhaps too many that get along well with straight up sex-addicted autists and narcissists.

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A Response to Armin Ronacher

We all know what happened in the last weeks and I didn't want to address any of that on here, largely because I quietly moved to other services and blocked the rest to not get distracted. But, alas, this topic is unavoidable and a recent post on Hacker News made me change my mind, so here I am, back on my bullshit.

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Due to recent events I will not discuss further, I finally will take the decision to abandon my pursuits.

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After some not-so-satisfying experiences with a few BSD's, I wanted to test something I am somewhat familiar with and came across a project anyone would suspect me of developing an instant dislike for: Mabox is a quite young distribution based on Manjaro, providing a customized Openbox environment and some additional tools for easier system customization. According to the project's homepage, this operating system aims to be fast, lightweight, functional, and stable – nothing beyond the common buzzword bingo, at least on the website's first page; the project's about page grants a little more insight:

Mabox Linux is based on Manjaro, featuring a customized Openbox window manager preconfigured to be ready to use.

It was inspired by CrunchBang, and uses some BunsenLabs utilities adapted for Manjaro.

Mabox Linux uses some of XFCE and LXDE components.

Tint2 is default panel.

Mabox use jgmenu for main menu, sidepanels, exit dialog and screenshot tool.

Ignoring the broken English for now, Mabox appears to emulate one of the most popular “lightweight” distributions, yet with a different base. It should be mentioned that Mabox is not the only distribution attempting to provide a CrunchBang-like experience, however only BunsenLabs succeeded at reaching a “wider” userbase. Given that I use a lightweight distribution based on Arch Linux as my daily driver and already tested Manjaro last year, it shouldn't be too difficult to judge Mabox.

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With its initial release dating back to 1993, FreeBSD is a fork of 386BSD, which was a fork of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, initially called “Berkeley Unix”) developed by the Computer System Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley from 1978 to 1995. Despite not really known by its name outside of information technologies, this distribution powers gaming consoles, such as the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 3 and 4, servers directly and via the distribution TrueNAS, and Darwin, the base for all operating systems developed and maintained by Apple, making it an “all-rounder” among operating systems.

It is said that FreeBSD shares many similarities with Linux, however main differences between the two are the project's scopes and licensing. While Linux is just a kernel with device drivers licensed under GPL 2.0, FreeBSD provides documentation and userland utilities alongside an own kernel and drivers, all licensed under a less-restrictive FreeBSD license that is incompatible with GPL, OSI, and Copyleft.

Taking both project's similarities into account, I assumed it would not be too hard to give FreeBSD a chance. My excitement, though, did not last long.

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