arch because i want to be cool, dual-boot with windows 10 because i won't ever be [fucking zoomers and their AAA competitive multiplayer shooters and their proprietary graphics drivers]
also literally the only reason i thought to do this is i totally ironically, just to see if i could, wanted to rig a bash terminal with shell-mommy
i think it was a twitter post i saw an indeterminate amount of time ago saying "you don't realize how much stuff you have until you have to move house". the same is definitely true for digital relocations
i was under the impression that i could transfer everything i needed to using a single 32 GB flash drive—and then i remembered i was holding on to 36 GB of sql databases from a research project i abandoned. and that's just one folder i wanted to keep; not including 3.5 GB of random images and videos, not including 75 GB of emulators and roms i forgot i had [that's not coming with. i can't], not including a PDF copy of the DSM-5 i have for some reason???, not including all the files i forgot and all the files i'm still forgetting
maybe i'm too attached. a whole bunch of this stuff isn't strictly necessary—old notes and files i needed for classes, seas of config files and options [probably containing a bunch of legacy stuff i ought to remake from scratch], things that are definitely archived somewhere that i can redownload [or just not keep locally in the first place]—but, like moving house, it's as much sentimentality as practicality. maintaining comfort and familiarity despite change
then again, i do have some cleaning to do before i leave completely
most of the gap between the last post and this one was me idly scrolling cohost and listening to music, a little too apprehensive to actually start. worried i'm forgetting something. not like i could forget something—it's just a dual-boot, the original files will still be there if i need them—but it's more an ego thing. the entire time i spend cleaning up my mistakes i'll simmer in them, and that's worse than the work itself
ah, fuck it. cloning my drive, just in case, then running the installer.
[the backup process was not supposed to take four hours. it was also entirely unnecessary]
installation guides are for poseurs. that being said this is still a windows dual-boot so i hereby declare this following-instructions-to-the-letter time
also, on a completely different note: it turns out i get immensely frustrated when my focus is broken. and my focus is broken incredibly often, by any number of things and occasionally nothing at all. i'm sure this isn't hinting at anything i should know about myself, and it should immediately be forgotten
i don't know how to use fdisk. there. i said it. i need to resize partitions to make space and i don't know how to do that in fdisk so i'm rebooting in windows and using disk management. leave me alone >:*(
also arch's terminal opening in full brightness is awful. 80% of the screen is black and my eyes are still in pain
[i promise, through all the complaining, that i'm still enjoying myself. if nothing else because there are a lot of spaces for me to disengage and watch youtube or something. my writing just isn't inclined toward that sort of silver-lining positivity. never has been. i'm not working on it; it's a personality trait.]
or, rather, first reboot. basic configuration done. windows no longer appearing as a boot option but that's ok for the time being. next steps: desktop environment [yeah, i know, i'm a coward. you'll be even more upset when you find out i use kde], standard applications, a whole bunch of settings-tweaking, and importing my old data.
[i wish i had more to say. these updates tend to be kind of short.]
[i suppose i could complain about the amount of time all this is taking, but that's less linux and more Me—i'm too easily distracted for... most activities, especially activities that involve major changes to things i interact with daily. if i hadn't [technically] done all this before i wouldn't imagine that i could, even with all the allowances and shortcuts i'm making and taking for myself. it'd almost be pathetic to someone looking over my shoulder]
[in the time i've spent writing this update on my secondary laptop [yes, i'm the sort of privileged nerdkid to have a secondary laptop, and i wouldn't be doing all this if i weren't], i've forgotten exactly what i was doing on the primary. it's in the bios menu. probably something to do with boot order, then. i'll figure it out]
- integrated and dedicated gpu
- of different brands
- that require different proprietary drivers
- in a laptop, so they need power management configured
i remember this being utter hell to set up. nowhere to go but forward, i suppose
[aside: how do i make the spaces around lists smaller? i tried style="margin: 0.5em;" and other values but the only thing that seemed to have any effect was like -50px, which feels like i'm doing something wrong]
installed xorg/sddm/plasma and It Just Works. what the hell [did i do wrong last time|am i doing wrong now]?
[why did i title the last two "arch update" instead of "arch install"? i'll go edit those later, so nobody thinks i'm actually doing something relevant]
this post is coming from arch! firefox on kde plasma, most of my profile settings copied over [still can't get userContent.css to take but i was only using it for a single image so it's not really that big a deal]
todo: more programs [discord, email, paru, spotify [yeah, i know, i'm mainstream. but sometimes the simple answer is enough], school-related programs as necessary], and all the settings i forgot to configure
i don't know if i forgot something during install or whatever, but the plasma package group didn't come with... anything, nearly. no ark, no dolphin, no konsole [that one confused me for a while. grabbed it off kde discover, thought i'd be fine, then tried to set up a shortcut for it and realized it was a flatpak for some reason. virtual console to the rescue]
but, beyond all that, it's past 23:00 my time [yeah, i know, western US, you're all tired of us waltzing into your communities and cultures like we own the place, but i can't help where i'm from], and i don't really feel like i've accomplished anything. i suppose i haven't yet completed the goal i set out with—i could do it by midnight, probably—but it doesn't really seem worth the effort anymore. the journey wasn't particularly exciting and neither is the destination. at least i feel a little more comfortable posting on cohost, i guess
i suppose i haven't yet completed the goal i set out with—i could do it by midnight, probably—but it doesn't really seem worth the effort anymore.
as it turns out, both of these things were false
i'm still pretty sure i can do it, just not in an hour [this is probably going to be the rest of my day]
at this point, it'd probably benefit me as much as anyone else tagging along on this accursed journey to explain what i want to do
i want to be able to press a button [maybe enter, maybe a function key, maybe a shortcut] to prepend a line i have typed but not run with the shell-mommy invocation, and immediately run the new line [i suppose "immediately run" isn't super necessary, it just means two keystrokes to run instead of one]
i would also like to be able to press a button to prepend a line with sudo, becaue this script becomes a whole lot less practical if i can no longer perform admin tasks
bonus points if i can get the invocation to trigger randomly, but that's not nearly as important
my options are:
- prompt_command: developer-recommended method, but my rather limited understanding leads me to assume this won't play nice with sudo [also running on every command might get annoying]
- bind trickery: following the example of this stackexchange question. lets me put the script on a shortcut but i have to learn escape codes [and it just seems kinda hacky, but hey isn't that what i was aiming for]
- pre_cmd: as suggested in this issue report, which i only found while i was writing this update. while i may be using zsh that doesn't mean i know how to, so i have no idea if or how this would work [aside: maybe the issue i was imagining with sudo [that is, it won't do anything if it's not at the beginning of the line] isn't actually an issue? nobody seems to have brought it up, and i haven't tested it myself]
several quick notes, now that i have explored some things:
- sudo isn't a problem. got myself worked up over nothing >:(
- no longer certain whether i'm supposed to be using precmd or preexec for this. and prompt_command makes less and less sense the more i read about it, so i'm not using that unless i get some code to copy-paste
- with every update i learn a tiny bit more css [i just figured out the first-list-item spacing from 2.1, and now i'm playing around with bullet styles]. maybe by the end of the year i'll be able to make a post people want to see