I was on leetx a few times this week, everything was working great.

Yeah, any pointing device is fine. And keyboard shortcuts, ask easy to setup since it’s just .xml.

I mainly mean, in comparison to a tiling WM which is intended to be key commands and minimise mouse use, Openbox is based around stacking and menus. It works be just as easy as KDE or Gnome to use keys.

“We make a mess of things when we start lying.”

It’s written in an older English style. Essentially it’s just the first one you’ve mentioned.

The ‘first’ in the second half of the phrase isn’t relevant in current times but would have been common to include in sayings like this - it’s more noting that you have the intention of lying, not that you’ve found yourself doing so off the cuff.

It’s like this: “if you are going out there to lie about something, this is going to go to shit”. Rather than, “this is going to shit because it’s the first time you’re lying”, that’s a far too literal take on older English.

And for any non-native English speakers - ‘practice’ is the act of doing something, as opposed to ‘practise’ being learning/mastering through repetition.

I just finished Ys 2 (in the Ys Chronicles version) and going to move on Ys -The Oath In Felghana soon.

The only Ys have I played when I was young was Ys 3 -Wanderers From Ys, and I loved it, so it will be cool to see what Oath changes up.

This one came out, I want to say, around the time of Pillars of Eternity, Divinity Original Sin, Tyranny, Wasteland 2.

Which were all a similar style like that, but Pathfinder was the only one that didn’t get a positive reception. I remember clearly wondering “What does this one do wrong?”

That they had a bad prototype and they fixed it during development.

People are jumping down your throat because you’re talking about N64 emulation being just fine on a GameCube emulator which plays a total of 21 of the 388 N64 games.

That’s fine that you only like those games, but it’s irrelevant to a discussion about N64 emulators and it’s only a tiny subset of games for the system.

You can see this right? Surely you understand that?

It’s nothing special, it’s just what I like. I learned Linux using fluxbox, and later moved to Openbox because it was more feature complete. It’s a window manager, stacking-style, mouse-centric unlike Sway, i3, Hyprland, dwm etc.

All config is done through a handwritten xml, but there exist gui tools to help edit/write all or parts of this for you.

No panel by default, so you’ll need to find your own. You just right-click the desktop and you get a menu.

It’s called a pipe menu, and it’s been nearly 20 years since I learned about it so I’ll do my best to remember how it works. The pipe menu dynamically changes as bash scripts are activated on mouse movement. So pointing at one thing in the menu would activate a script which triggers the next part of the menu to appear.

The hook is that openbox and fluxbox are very fast and use very little system resources.

Openbox is considered to be bug-free and hasn’t had any commits in nearly 10 years I believe. I think openbox is still being used in the lxqt suite, so maybe the default for Lubuntu? (if that’s still a thing!)

My only experience with a Fedora-based distro at all has been Bazzite that I had on a htpc for about 12 months, and the use case doesn’t really let me compare to Aeon. Similar to Aeon though, I had no problems with it during that time.

I had Aurora on a thumbstick because I wanted to try it, but never got around to it.

I was hoping something would happen with Kalpa, but I don’t believe anything will. I think if it was ever there, that with be best for me. I’ve moved to cachy OS mainly because I needed to get certain things working that were only packaged in appimage- BUT I believe I could have worked it out in Aeon by fiddling around with distrobox. I was going to test out Aurora for this and just stumbled into cachy OS instead.

I’m not sure if I would go back to Aeon now, as I’m back on KDE again I don’t think I want to look at gnome for a while.

But for my tastes, I think once there is a mature wayland-based Openbox replacement (eyes on labwc) I’d look around to see which distro works best with that. I’d imagine it could be Tumbleweed but I’d also watch how well it works on something extremely stable maybe Debian-based.

Nothing is getting me really excited about Linux right now, not the way Ubuntu did in the 2000s, or how Crunchbang did, and not the way Tumbleweed did. Which is probably for the best because I don’t have time for tinkering or system maintenance, and that’s what makes the immutable distros shine.

I used Aeon myself from it being called microOS Desktop Gnome until around August of this year, it had replaced my old Tumbleweed install, and it had been rock solid the entire time. Absolutely loved it.

It was everything I needed up to that point - wayland, automated updates and rollback, the default packages were spot on and super light, network config perfect out of the box (something I always struggle with), flatpak first! I’m a KDE user (well I’m really an Openbox guy but no wayland solution yet), so I suffered gnome for the sake of having a great system. I really like what Richard Brown has achieved, it’s almost perfect.

You suspect right, my partner is not a tech user - Firefox, steam, libre office is pretty much it for her. When she shut down the night before this she had just been uploading photos to her cloud storage.

I believe it was related to the implementation of full disk encryption. As this happened immediately after that policy was changed.

after the ASUS UEFI splash screen; the screen goes black, it flashes up ‘Random seed file is too short’.

Then it goes to a prompt:

'Please enter recovery key for disk root-x86-64 (aeon_root): (press tab for no echo)

I found the recovery key in my inbox, and in my partners sent files, as we knew it was probably important so she sent me a copy during installation. But when I put in the recovery key, let it go through the motions, it would restart and come back to this prompt. No amount of retrying the recovery key helped.

I posted the error on the Aeon subreddit but after the recovery key wouldn’t work I just walked away from it. I couldn’t find any other mentions of this error anywhere, and the death of search engines has made this kind of thing difficult to chase down.

With everything going on in our life I couldn’t troubleshoot this, I just needed her system up and I had Aurora ready on a thumbstick already.

It’s not mirror selection, it’s just not optimal compared to what Pacman is doing with parallel downloads.

Downloading hundreds of tiny libxcxcxc.so one-by-one is painful. Since switching to pacman, I watch it download these, doing 10 packages at a time. 10 packages in 1 second versus zypper doing similarly sized 10 packages in ~10-15 seconds.

I don’t need the mirror to be faster, I need zypper to handle more than one of these thousands of files at a time. Downloading a 100kb file at 15mb/s is no good to me when it’s stopping and starting 800 of them sequentially.

And I only see the conversation go around in circles especially on zypper’s github.

You can run steam from a terminal, and it could show you any errors that are popping up during the game launch.

I can’t say much because I don’t use it, but I put it on my partners computer after Aeon crapped itself and put the system in a boot loop until I switched the hard disk out.

Her use case is simple- immutable, hassle free updates, and some games.

She has no problems with it so far.

I used it a little bit to back up an old hard drive, it’s just what I expected, a simple KDE implementation that isn’t messing about.

But what I really hope it will be is no random breaking that takes the entire system out, (and to be fair to Aeon in that case - Aeon is still in release candidate).

I’ve been using it a few months and it’s been reliable. But in my mind, my use case, cachyos or endeavour could be interchangeable. I picked cachyos by chance because I was looking at Phoronix and they had just benchmarked it.

I hadn’t used an Arch system since 2009 (except a brief stint with Manjaro around 2018 that ended in absolute disaster after about 2 weeks), so I was a bit skeptical about it.

I like the default browser is pretty much a hardened Firefox. Good boot times. The packages I need were all there. It was easy to setup snapper. The little aesthetic changes cachyos made are nicely done.

I’ve got a problem with port forwarding I can’t get working, never had that problem before and I don’t know network stuff well enough to figure it out.

The updates are the winner for me- I don’t know how long this has been a thing with arch but downloading multiple packages at the same time. Game changer. I love Tumbleweed, but a 2gb “zypper dup” downloading package by package could take me 30 - 60 minutes.

I mostly use flatpak, but I also needed to make use of some appimages and only 3 or 4 things I needed to install as system packages. So my Aeon install wasn’t working out for that and I wasn’t prepared to go back to tumbleweed.

Around 2012-2014 it was common to have Conky print things like system information or keyboard shortcuts in the desktop.

I think Conky is still around although less popular now. You could look into that though.

This is just an example from an image search for Conky desktop, but it gives you an idea how information can be displayed https://live.staticflickr.com/4062/4543953032_e6d7473206.jpg

I just installed MGS5 and Ground Zeros. Having never played a Metal Gear game, so I might hate it but I want to try.

Desktop mode I find just fine, steam controller was how we operated a htpc for a few years. Gamepad control worked for kodi, but anything else I had to drop into desktop and mouse around with the touchpads and triggers. Little bit more finnicky with the deck because of the size of the pads though.

I’ve been in Grim Fandango and the Monkey Island (1-3 are my jam) lately. Technobabylon. I’ve been working my way through games I haven’t had time for because of work, like Gemini Rue, the Rusty Lake games. I never played Day of the Tentacle back in the day either so I’m keen for that one. Va-11 Hall-a.

I could not get handy with fps games on the deck at all. I really wanted to run Borderlands 1 again but I was just getting murdred trying to aim with gamepad controls. Touch on right pad activating gyro set me on the right path, and that technique translates to my steam controller when I dock too. It feels more natural to be able to flick around like with a mouse as week. I briefly had a ps3 in 2010. I could not play fps well with a pad. I went from Sega to Dos, to Win 95/98, back to Sega. So I never played around with thumb joysticks. They were never part of my life until I bought a ps3 and just fumbled around with it.

Also Blood. I’m through the first two episodes but put it away for a while.

Been on a Kknd kick in the last few months. But it’s worked so well I’ll move into some other favourites when I’m done - Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, Blood and Magic.

Last year I did my 3000th Fallout 2 run on my desktop pc, but now I’ve got a deck I’m planning to do my first ever fallout 1 play.

In Torchlight 2 (this has been my deck go-to for hack and slash), I play using both pads to move mouse. Getting into the rhythm of it, I easily cover the entire screen by flicking over one pad and setting off in the other. It’s a technique I started using on steam controller some years ago.

I haven’t played Grim Dawn on deck yet, but I understand people are playing it with native gamepad control, I’ll see how that goes.

As always, I’m not going to be able to play half my usual games without touchpads.

Analog sticks do not make a good mouse replacement.

My daughter watches a video on YouTube called Sonic Retold, just an animation using in-game graphics from Sonic 1.

When it gets to labyrinth zone, Sonic stops and looks at the water - no matter where I am in the house she yells out to me “Sonic doesn’t like water!”

It absolutely doesn’t work when 98% of content creators out there use this type of graphic unironically.

It just adds on to the list of videos to avoid, so they’ve achieved that.