June 4th, 2024

omg guys she's so cute what do I say!!!

Probably gonna write some more in-depth about my trials with trying to get through the install, since it took a couple of tries, but you know it succeeded and I'm officially an Arch user, cause I've got a Neofetch to prove it:

You can't see it due to how I downsized the photo, but my system has been dubbed "archtrans" as a reference to both the Rain World subregion of Auxiliary Transmission Array (because my other devices are also named after important parts of the FP/LTTM facility grounds) and because any intellectual knows that Linux is the official operating system of trans people, of course.

June 11th, 2024

I had to reinstall because I forgot to actually include the Wi-Fi utility in the original install and essentially softlocked myself into being unable to add anything I didn't already have. I suppose I was warned that it wouldn't be included, but when you use something before even running the install script, you kind of end up taking it for granted as something that'll be there by default.

But we're very much back, update worked completely without hostname resolution error, and that's where I', ending it for tonight

June 17th, 2024

My next project that I wanted to try after getting back on my feet was trying out Newsboat, an RSS reader that works within text-only environments, which is great because I still haven't chosen any form of window manager or desktop environment and am still operating entirely out of terminal.

To get Newsboat to boot, a /urls text file must be created to be read from. I later installed Nano for actual multi-line text editing, but before that I wanted to learn what I felt was an important lesson on how to create a text file with a command input alone. I had first created the /urls file through output redirection by using the echo command, with the test string I wrote into the file simply being "a". I thought this was funny.

After this, I didn't actually have in mind any RSS feeds to enter, but I did have a test option, as I had previously installed a feed finder extension to my Firefox, and as such knew that my Tumblr had a observable feed url. So after tossing that in there with a new echo command (and remembering to reenable my wifi), I was now able to scroll through text-only renditions of my 20 most recent posts. Certainly an interesting experience.

Having proved to myself my ability to create files command-only, I just made things simple for myself and installed Nano. Having a proper text editor certainly opens up countless future possibilites.

June 22nd, 2024

For a while, I had hesitated on implementing a graphical environment due to my personal annoyances with the aesthetic trends in modern GUI design. Excessive and unyielding use of dark modes, drop shadows, overdone animations, and an approach to color that simultaneously sits at the worst point between textured and flat shaded, are all things--that unfortunately for me--are both ubiquitous modern UI touches, and also bug me aesthetically.

Realistically, I knew that every graphical desktop environment commonly used on Linux had enough configuration on average to be able to remove these aesthetic characteristics through varying levels of effort, but because none of the online demonstrations of these configuration possibilities ever covered the type of look and feel that I wanted, it was hard to ideate in my mind the best possible choice on a solely superficial regard.

So instead I just decided to just go read the Hyprland wiki, on account of the unrivaled scale of its centralized documentation compared to other window managers. As it turns out, this was a very good idea, and was one of those instances where just going for a choice on impulse results in getting past choice paralysis.

And now, with a window manager, I can run Firefox!

A tiling window manager certainly has some advantages on a computer with a broken left mouse button (also yes, I am aware that there is a setting within Hyprland's configuration to swap LMB and RMB), but aside from that, I don't really have much more to say about this particular project. My configurations so far have been minimal, just doing things like squaring off the window corners and removing the window animations, but I'll probably get into doing something more involved at some point later. I just needed to be able to run Firefox.

I'm thinking my next project will probably getting a terminal-based file manager.