Fri 05 April 2019
tags: Void Fedora personal
When I originally found Void it was something new and exciting to play with, and I was more interested in BSD than I am now. After using it for about 8 months, the honeymoon phase has worn off and I'm less enamored with the distro than I was previously. Runit is still nice but I'm not really using it any differently than systemd. The lack of 64-bit WINE in the default repository has made running some programs more difficult for me, and programs in xbps-src don't always have updates to match other distros. Those are just a quick summary of why I'm not sure how long I'll be staying with Void. The first victim so far has been my Thinkpad.
My laptop has been having a few issues with Void that have been mostly excusable, but I wanted to push through them. However, I eventually realized that I had screwed something up enough that I needed to just reinstall even though I could spend time troubleshooting. While some problems were definitely not Void's fault, some might have been. In the not-Void camp, my i3 config got messed up somehow. It would use all the correct shortcuts I had added or removed (no more arrow keys), but auto-running programs (like to set my background or enable compton) no longer worked. This meant running `feh --bg-fill <background file>` manually every time I logged in just to avoid an all-black background. Uninstalling and re-installing i3wm didn't work, neither did wiping my config and starting from scratch. Playing with 64-bit WINE was also a hassle, as my laptop didn't really have the processing power to quickly or easily recompile when a new WINE update came out. While I understand the reasoning behind not including WINE64 in the repository, I disagree with the decision anyway.
So what did I move to? I switched to an old friend - Fedora. I haven't touched it since Fedora 25, but I'm dipping my toes into RedHat distros given that most enterprise options will probably be using RHEL, Oracle Linux, or CentOS. After backing up my entire homedir to a flash drive (which was a mistake because I included my Steam library), I went through the painless install process and got Fedora running. Enabling the non-free repository was easy enough to do, and after that I was able to get my main setup back up and running. I also made the switch from i3wm to dwm, which was helped by this article published by Fedora Magazine. It took a bit of adjusting, but I've found that it feels almost as natural as i3 already. I'm using slstatus instead of the default status bar, but I've found some decent tutorials that I'm willing to try. For the rest of my workflow, I got Steam and Discord installed, and even League of Legends runs on it through WINE!
My desktop is going to stay on Void for now, partially because I'm not as dependent on it being able to use 64-bit WINE for programs (mainly games). It was while I was considering the switch that I realized that right now, I don't really use Linux any different than I use Windows. My pain points were mainly focused around not being able to play my Windows games on Linux, but the majority of the work I'm doing can be done on any operating system. Because of that, my goal is to stick to Linux and maybe play around with it a bit more. Maybe I can start "ricing" my i3 setup at home to set it apart more, and hopefully a few other config changes will also help me stick to Linux more. Trying to use my computer's power for more than just gaming will also help with that, but my main projects aren't going anywhere soon (other than my senior project).
One last thing - this entire website is likely to change soon. The domain won't be any different, but I'm looking at moving to a static site generator. While I like the idea of a Lua-based setup like Luapress, I'm probably going with Pelican simply for the greater documentation and support available. I'm not really using most of the Wordpress features, so going with a static site should keep it snappy while getting rid of a lot of useless server load. It also means I won't have to worry about updating Wordpress like it's constantly asking me to do.