Squiddles

There’s something called “Brook’s Law” that basically observes that a software project which onboards more developers in order to catch up will fall further behind. I hope they’re careful about how they allocate new developers or they’ll end up doing a year of onboarding, rewriting core code, and have no meaningful updates for 6-12 months. I know they have the resources to spare, and that scenario worked out okay for Valheim, but I hope the game doesn’t lose momentum because they overhire or don’t allocate enough senior devs to continue feature development while they catch the new devs up to speed.

Edit to add: I don’t think it actually matters in this instance if they don’t have a large player base by the time the game is feature complete. They don’t have continuous revenue streams like a live service game, so hiring more devs is ultimately just about making sure they have enough talent to make good on their early access promises. The company could probably dissolve tomorrow and all the staff could live the rest of their lives in luxury never working again. It’d be a dick move, but they already sold an insane number of copies.

Some people learn that way, but most don’t. It’s usually better to start with a working environment and work on one thing at a time until you learn enough that you’re ready to dig down another layer. Start with little mysteries and learn the structure of things and how to troubleshoot before jumping in the deep end. Having a system that’s hopelessly broken and you don’t know why or how to fix it is just likely to turn people away from Linux entirely. People don’t win extra points for suffering needlessly.

The bigger problem when running Arch is that there’s a very high gap between “the bootloader makes the kernel run” and “functional desktop system”. The installation guide will get you to the first one. For someone who’s used to Windows, even as an IT pro, learning Arch is a firehose that’s hard to drink from.

Once you’ve pacstrap’d and set up a user you reboot and start your new OS. Except you have no internet because you didn’t know you had to install dhcpcd. Fine, install that–except your user isn’t in sudoers, so you have to figure out how to get back to being root to edit the sudoers file. With visudo. Ten minutes later you’ve figured out how to find and edit the right line. Another ten to get out of vi. Then once that’s sorted you’re sitting at a terminal you don’t know any commands for with no idea how to get to a graphical environment.

You look on your phone and find a recommendation for XFCE4 as a lightweight and simple DE. Great, install that. Try to launch it, and…a bunch of arcane errors. Another hour of troubleshooting and you learn that you missed xorg, which for some reason isn’t a dependency of XFCE4. O…kay. You don’t want to have to launch it every time you boot, so you go digging and find out you need a desktop manager. Takes some time, but you finally install one and enable the service in systemd, which you have to do manually for some reason.

Finally you get to a graphical environment, and…the fonts are all weird, and unicode symbols are just placeholders. Wait, fonts. You have to install fonts. More research, but you get there. Finally you launch a browser and are delighted to find something familiar. It all works the same. Great! Let’s watch a video to make sure playback is working, and…no sound.

Okay, more research, and turns out you missed pulseaudio. Install that, start the daemon aaaand…no audio. Fine, how do you check the audio level? Ah, there’s an XFCE4 plugin for pulseaudio. Find that, install it, put it on your panel, click it and…pavucontrol isn’t installed. Whatever that is. Okay, install it and try again. Great! So, for some reason the default audio level when you install is 0. Turn that up and you finally hear sound! Hours after starting the process.

And every. little. thing. is like that. For weeks. Especially with Nvidia, and especially if you make the mistake of following a recent guide that shunts you into a Wayland environment. Every time you need to do something there are 20 options, five of which are well-documented but deprecated, the first three you try don’t work for reasons you don’t understand, then you finally find something that works well enough. Rinse, repeat, for every little thing.

And this is coming from a complete Arch stan. I love Arch. It’s my only distro these days. I’m on Hyprland, my neovim is tricked out, everything is slick, responsive, just takes a couple keystrokes to accomplish anything I want to do, and I have everything set up exactly how I want it. It took a long time to get there, though, and I’ve been using Linux off and on for over 20 years, maining it for the last 10.

Screen sharing is fine, handled by Pipewire. OBS is adding (has added?) streaming through Pipewire too. And I’ve had no issues getting screenshots using grim, which isn’t tied to a specific compositor. Not everything is copacetic, but the things you’re talking about are mostly non-issues these days.

Great name, btw

Fair enough. I used XFCE for 15 years and decided to give Hyprland a go. Still some rough edges, and some shockingly basic things are still being figured out (should multiple windows from the same process be able to set different icons, and windows being able to set–or even hint–where they want to go), but overall I’ve had basically zero issues, and I’m enjoying it enough that I made the change permanent. Screen share and streaming work fine. I wouldn’t call the overall functionality mature, but it’s perfectly workable. Unless, you know…Nvidia. I’ve heard it’s gotten a bit better lately, but I wouldn’t have switched if I hadn’t gone AMD for my new GPU.

Yep, using Pipewire.

Arch, because I can never be happy except when I’m bickering with a machine.

Seriously, though, I like the control and the learning factor. I enjoy knowing what my computer is doing and why, AUR is great, and the documentation is generally top-notch. Once you get past the point in the learning curve where everything is on fire and you don’t know why (don’t forget the ‘linux’ package when you pacstrap, kids!), it’s a delight to use

A couple days ago I tried Hyprland just to see what it was like. I’ve been on XFCE for over a decade and expected to play with Hyprland for a couple hours, go “Huh, that’s cool”, and uninstall it, but I think the switch may be permanent. It’s fantastic