• 4 Posts
  • 171 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: September 6th, 2023

help-circle

  • Okay, so here’s the recap:

    I woke up this morning and decided my main drive (just a 500GB SSD) was too full, at about 85%, so I decided to do something about that. I go through the usual: pacman -Sc, paccache -rk0, and pacman -Qqtd | pacman -Rns - (which I’ve aliased to “orphankiller” because that’s too much typing for me). None of that did anything though, as I’m usually pretty up on this, and I expected it, so my next step was to find other ways of deleting unnecessary files floating around, and that meant a trip to the usually very helpful Arch wiki.

    On the page “pacman Tips and Tricks”, I find 1.7: Detecting More Unneeded Packages. “Perfect!” I thought, “That’s exactly what I’m looking for!” I enthusiastically type in the command pacman -Qqd | pacman -Rns -, and then quickly go check how much space I just saved. Nada. Or at least not enough to move the percentage point. “Oh well, keep looking,” I think and I go back to Firefox to click some more links in hopes that one of them will be the space saving ultra-script that I need. The first one I click, I get an error from my trusty browser, I don’t remember exactly what it was but it was something about not being able to verify the page. “Weird, let’s try another one.” Nope, same thing.

    Well, being that I had just deleted something, I figured I should go see what exactly it was that I did. It was a good thing I’d left the terminal window open, because after just a few scrolls I saw it: ca_certificates, which Firefox absolutely needs. “Great, I’ll just reinstall.” Nope! I just deleted my pacman cache, and pacman also needs those certificates to download from the Arch repo’s mirrors! “Fantastic,” I grumbled while I tried to think of how I could get this pesky package back on my machine.

    Then it occurred to me: I’ve been keeping up with my btrfs snapshots (for once, lol)! I can just backup to yesterday and forget this whole mess! So I bring up Timeshift, and we’re on our way back to a functioning system! Or so I thought. See, I don’t have a separate /home partition, but I do have a separate @home subvolume, so when Timeshift asked me if I wanted to restore that too, I clicked the check mark. Only thing is, I don’t think I actually have a separate @home subvolume, which brings us to the error in the meme. /home wouldn’t mount, and that meant I was borked.

    Fortunately, our story has a happy ending! I DDG’d the error on my phone, and found a post from like seven years ago, about someone who had this same set of circumstances, and the one reply was my fix: just go into /etc/fstab and delete the “subvolid” part of whatever partition that’s giving you grief. Did that, reboot, and we’re finally fixed! And now, forevermore, I shall check what I’m deleting before I hit the enter button!

    The post-script is bittersweet though, because after all this trouble, and then the rest of the afternoon working on the original problem, I am down to… 81%. Oh well.







  • I think it’s just that the defaults for NetworkManager don’t play nice with systemd, wpa_supplicant would take several minutes to connect to my wifi, and dhcpd just dropped my connection after I rebooted the router (for unrelated purposes) and would reconnect for about a minute before it dropped it again.

    I’ve still been having an issue where if I reboot the computer, NetworkManager will hang up the boot process indefinitely, but this doesn’t happen if I shut it down and then turn it back on with the power button. Still haven’t figured that one out, all of my research said that this issue was supposed to have been fixed with the last update, but not for me I guess!








  • Bazzite, it’s an immutable Fedora-based distro, so in the unlikely event that it breaks, you can just revert back to whatever you had before.

    Nobara is similar, Fedora-based but not immutable, which means you can tinker with it, but possibly also break it. Made by Glorious Eggroll, the guy behind the GE versions of proton and wine.

    Mint is a more general-purpose distro, based on Ubuntu (which itself is based on Debian), but it’s very user-friendly and does just fine with games.

    Manjaro is fine, it’s the one I put on my mom’s computer because she needed a Windows program that I found in the AUR. It was pretty decent for the four games that she plays lol (The Sims 4, AoE2, Neverwinter Nights, and Prince of Qin). It’s Arch-based, but not bleeding-edge like Arch, so it’s ostensibly more stable.

    As far as the Index goes, idk about that, as I don’t own one. However, I just DDG’d “valve index on linux”, and quite a few guides came up, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get it going. Plus Valve is a pretty Linux-friendly company,