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Cake day: Jul 04, 2023
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This is basically the holy grail for finding how to do things or troubleshooting once you have the basics down: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page
A large amount of information is transferrable to other distros, particularly if they use systemd.
I would also spend some time getting comfortable with the command line. There are a million tutorials, guides, and free courses on this topic. Find a shell and terminal emulator you like. I’m using Fish and Kitty these days.
Going against the grain, maybe consider EndeavourOS for a distro? https://endeavouros.com/
I think that error is related to a missing dbus session but don’t quote me on that.
You will probably find it easier to use a system level service, but run it as your unprivileged user with User= and Group= directives. Once you get that working, there are various other parameters you can add to harden the service if you like.
This is a good reference for hardening: https://docs.arbitrary.ch/security/systemd.html
The arch wiki has a good general reference for all things systemd: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd
I agree with the general idea of what you’re saying, but it’s a slippery slope.
Most people I know personally would never take the effort to learn anything past the point of “Ask ChatGPT” when they have a problem. What happens when the model is wrong, or simply cannot solve the problem? Or maybe they have no network connection and cannot run something suitable locally?
At that level of coddling, then they might not even have the ability to find and open a man page, or edit a config file without a GUI. And that’s a problem. It’s not even Linux-specific. I went to school with “smart” computer science students who don’t even understand file extensions or what a shortcut conceptually is.
What I’m getting at, is there needs to be some kind of balance, or people will just gradually become more useless.
This will be a bit long, so feel free to skip to the end tl;dr.
I've been a long time user of Linux. Back in the day I would burn live CDs like Slackware and Mandrake to try out. There was even that one distro that fit on a floppy, Damn Small Linux. More recently, I manage several Debian-based servers and a Raspbian system. However, I felt stuck daily-driving Windows due to game support. Thankfully, that is no longer the case, so I decided to make the switch. Just wanted to share some observations I've made in the course of that.
A little while ago, I setup a laptop for a family member with Mint, primarily based on popularity and community recommendation. At the same time, I installed Mint on a laptop and used it for a bit. It's basically a backup laptop, so the intention was to have something stable and easy to use/update. I found Mint nice at first, but some cracks started showing after a bit, and eventually I became frustrated with Cinnamon. Since I am familiar with Arch, and it allows for choice of DE (if any), I decided to stick with it for the foreseeable future.
**Current Setups**
- Desktop: Arch, BTRFS, KDE, Wayland
- Laptop: Arch, FDE, BTRFS, Hyprland
- Home "server": Arch, Gnome, Wayland (mainly run headless, for AI workloads)
**KDE**
I hadn't used KDE since the days when Plasma was in beta. It was a complete mess then. Things have matured quite a bit since then, so I decided to give a shot again for the desktop. I think, mainly, I wanted to familiarity of tray icons and such.
KDE has been great! I love the amount of pointless eye-candy I can enable, and the things that can be customized. Over the last few months, I've experienced a couple crashes which seem to be related to kwin. There's also a weird issue where powerdevil (or something related to it) is resetting one or more of my monitor's brightness when it shouldn't be.
**Hyprland**
Since I don't recall using a tiling WM seriously, I thought it'd be fun to try out Hyprland. It also fits well with the laptop, a Thinkpad X390, having an older intel processor and constrained thermal/power situation. Because I'm lazy, I chose a mostly pre-configured setup from [JaKooLit](https://github.com/JaKooLit/Hyprland-Dots). I like the look of it, and the other ones I considered require Network-Manager, so they were a no go.
Like with KDE, Hyprland has been great! It took less time than I expected to get accustomed to it, and everything mostly just works as expected. The main hiccups seem to come from software which renders in a fixed size, which isn't surprising. I also like there is a tree-sitter plugin for the DSL.
**Gnome**
I hadn't used Gnome much since the old days. It was a lot different then. It's hanging out on the so-called server, but I've only used it enough to get everything setup the way I like. GDM is disabled on startup.
My experience with Gnome is mixed. I like how "sleek" it is, but not that I need to install extensions for everything. If I were to use it daily, I'm sure I'd get used to it. Even then, GSettings/dconf sucks. I really don't get the design decision to create what is essentially the Windows registry, but on Linux.
**BTRFS**
Previously, I mainly stuck ext2/3/4, because it was familiar and easy. In this recent switch, I was looking for some more advanced features. After looking into ZFS a bit, I decided it wasn't for me. Too complicated, not in mainline kernel. So, BTRFS it is.
After some initial confusion, I'm really happy with BTRFS. I have automated snapshots with yabsnap, which has already proven helpful when I *may* have clobbered a system library and everything was messed up. The transparent compression is great as well.
**nvim**
Having used vim for several years, it seemed fitting to migrate to nvim. I quite like the support for Lua, and the wealth of themes, plugins and so forth. Using [Lazy](https://lazy.folke.io/) means I can pretty much just copy over a config and be up and running on a new/remote system with no fuss.
**Lutris**
Lutris is what I'm using to help facilitate running Windows-only games. Ultimately, it's a very nice piece of software, but is lacking in detailed documentation and sometimes requires reviewing logs to see what might be going wrong. Something I really like is the ability to wine/proton runtimes if the default isn't working. The simple GUI layout with box art is refreshing as well.
**systemd**
Some people really dislike systemd, and I get it. But I like it. I've fully embraced it alongside extras like networkd, timesyncd, and resolved. Need to do something on a schedule? Write a quick service and timer, then check on it once in a while. It's not quite as succinct as cron, but I prefer the consistent declarative syntax. I was very happy to discover [wg2nd](https://git.flu0r1ne.net/wg2nd/about/), which allowed me to convert my wireguard config files into networkd configs.
**Backups**
I'm using borgmatic, which automates borg, for backups. This is done daily, for all important files and the system partitions. Really couldn't be easier. In contrast, there are not a lot of advanced FOSS backup solutions for Windows, so I would manually run system partition backups there.
**Hardware Support**
I was pleasantly surprised to find my printer, an older Canon AIO, was supported by Gutenprint. My plan was to buy a new Brother laser printer, but I managed to get the existing one to work both via USB and wireless. This is great, as the Canon still technically works and I can get random "re-manufactured" cartridges on the cheap. I say technically because it's getting more noisy over time, squeaking, and really seeming to struggle. We'll see if it holds up.
All the other stuff, aside from fingerprint reader, work as expected. This is a far cry from 10-20 years ago. Great to see.
**Overall Thoughts**
Linux Desktop 2025 Edition has been awesome. Basically everything works better than I expected. Crashes less than the competition in my experience. I have the freedom, as a power user, to customize the experience. There are also no ads.
That said, I still have a Windows laptop for school, because they require it. I'm hating it more every day. There is one particular piece of software that only exists for Mac/Windows which means I can't retire that system, yet. This particular school has recently bought even more into MS. I'd drop them if I knew of any alternatives that weren't caught up in the same thing.
Should you switch to daily driving Linux? Yes, especially if you have some prior experience.
**tl;dr**
Linux has come quite a ways in the past couple decades and now is a great experience outside of some very specialized software/hardware.
This will be a bit long, so feel free to skip to the end tl;dr.
I've been a long time user of Linux. Back in the day I would burn live CDs like Slackware and Mandrake to try out. There was even that one distro that fit on a floppy, Damn Small Linux. More recently, I manage several Debian-based servers and a Raspbian system. However, I felt stuck daily-driving Windows due to game support. Thankfully, that is no longer the case, so I decided to make the switch. Just wanted to share some observations I've made in the course of that.
A little while ago, I setup a laptop for a family member with Mint, primarily based on popularity and community recommendation. At the same time, I installed Mint on a laptop and used it for a bit. It's basically a backup laptop, so the intention was to have something stable and easy to use/update. I found Mint nice at first, but some cracks started showing after a bit, and eventually I became frustrated with Cinnamon. Since I am familiar with Arch, and it allows for choice of DE (if any), I decided to stick with it for the foreseeable future.
**Current Setups**
- Desktop: Arch, BTRFS, KDE, Wayland
- Laptop: Arch, FDE, BTRFS, Hyprland
- Home "server": Arch, Gnome, Wayland (mainly run headless, for AI workloads)
**KDE**
I hadn't used KDE since the days when Plasma was in beta. It was a complete mess then. Things have matured quite a bit since then, so I decided to give a shot again for the desktop. I think, mainly, I wanted to familiarity of tray icons and such.
KDE has been great! I love the amount of pointless eye-candy I can enable, and the things that can be customized. Over the last few months, I've experienced a couple crashes which seem to be related to kwin. There's also a weird issue where powerdevil (or something related to it) is resetting one or more of my monitor's brightness when it shouldn't be.
**Hyprland**
Since I don't recall using a tiling WM seriously, I thought it'd be fun to try out Hyprland. It also fits well with the laptop, a Thinkpad X390, having an older intel processor and constrained thermal/power situation. Because I'm lazy, I chose a mostly pre-configured setup from [JaKooLit](https://github.com/JaKooLit/Hyprland-Dots). I like the look of it, and the other ones I considered require Network-Manager, so they were a no go.
Like with KDE, Hyprland has been great! It took less time than I expected to get accustomed to it, and everything mostly just works as expected. The main hiccups seem to come from software which renders in a fixed size, which isn't surprising. I also like there is a tree-sitter plugin for the DSL.
**Gnome**
I hadn't used Gnome much since the old days. It was a lot different then. It's hanging out on the so-called server, but I've only used it enough to get everything setup the way I like. GDM is disabled on startup.
My experience with Gnome is mixed. I like how "sleek" it is, but not that I need to install extensions for everything. If I were to use it daily, I'm sure I'd get used to it. Even then, GSettings/dconf sucks. I really don't get the design decision to create what is essentially the Windows registry, but on Linux.
**BTRFS**
Previously, I mainly stuck ext2/3/4, because it was familiar and easy. In this recent switch, I was looking for some more advanced features. After looking into ZFS a bit, I decided it wasn't for me. Too complicated, not in mainline kernel. So, BTRFS it is.
After some initial confusion, I'm really happy with BTRFS. I have automated snapshots with yabsnap, which has already proven helpful when I *may* have clobbered a system library and everything was messed up. The transparent compression is great as well.
**nvim**
Having used vim for several years, it seemed fitting to migrate to nvim. I quite like the support for Lua, and the wealth of themes, plugins and so forth. Using [Lazy](https://lazy.folke.io/) means I can pretty much just copy over a config and be up and running on a new/remote system with no fuss.
**Lutris**
Lutris is what I'm using to help facilitate running Windows-only games. Ultimately, it's a very nice piece of software, but is lacking in detailed documentation and sometimes requires reviewing logs to see what might be going wrong. Something I really like is the ability to wine/proton runtimes if the default isn't working. The simple GUI layout with box art is refreshing as well.
**systemd**
Some people really dislike systemd, and I get it. But I like it. I've fully embraced it alongside extras like networkd, timesyncd, and resolved. Need to do something on a schedule? Write a quick service and timer, then check on it once in a while. It's not quite as succinct as cron, but I prefer the consistent declarative syntax. I was very happy to discover [wg2nd](https://git.flu0r1ne.net/wg2nd/about/), which allowed me to convert my wireguard config files into networkd configs.
**Backups**
I'm using borgmatic, which automates borg, for backups. This is done daily, for all important files and the system partitions. Really couldn't be easier. In contrast, there are not a lot of advanced FOSS backup solutions for Windows, so I would manually run system partition backups there.
**Hardware Support**
I was pleasantly surprised to find my printer, an older Canon AIO, was supported by Gutenprint. My plan was to buy a new Brother laser printer, but I managed to get the existing one to work both via USB and wireless. This is great, as the Canon still technically works and I can get random "re-manufactured" cartridges on the cheap. I say technically because it's getting more noisy over time, squeaking, and really seeming to struggle. We'll see if it holds up.
All the other stuff, aside from fingerprint reader, work as expected. This is a far cry from 10-20 years ago. Great to see.
**Overall Thoughts**
Linux Desktop 2025 Edition has been awesome. Basically everything works better than I expected. Crashes less than the competition in my experience. I have the freedom, as a power user, to customize the experience. There are also no ads.
That said, I still have a Windows laptop for school, because they require it. I'm hating it more every day. There is one particular piece of software that only exists for Mac/Windows which means I can't retire that system, yet. This particular school has recently bought even more into MS. I'd drop them if I knew of any alternatives that weren't caught up in the same thing.
Should you switch to daily driving Linux? Yes, especially if you have some prior experience.
**tl;dr**
Linux has come quite a ways in the past couple decades and now is a great experience outside of some very specialized software/hardware.
My basic check is: Are there investors / vc people involved? If so, then it will inevitably enshittify. If not, then requires further investigation. OSI-approved open source is a big plus
Even when choosing what seems like good software, I think it’s important to consider switching costs. How easily can you move to another solution, say the second pick, if things go south?
I’ve been using Arch off and on for a long time, since it was horrible to install and updates did often break stuff. This is not the case now 🖖, and the Arch wiki is your friend.
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Consider using btrfs with automated snapshots using yabsnap. It includes a configurable pacman hook in case something goes awry. Also just nice to have snapshots in case you accidentally delete a file or something.
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Use paru, an AUR helper. Good for random things which may not be officially packaged. Expect to run into failures, and learn to diagnose them. Sometimes it’s just a new dependency the packager missed. For both paru and pacman, clean the cache once in a while or automatically, or things will get out of hand.
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Do the “manual” setup, at least the first time, so you have an idea what’s going on. Don’t forget to install essential stuff like iwd (if needed) when you do pacstrap, or else you might have to boot from live again to fix it. Once you’re done, take care to follow the important post install steps, like setting up a user with sudo, a firewall, sshd, etc.
As for general setup, I’ve recently embraced systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved. Might be worth giving it a shot, since there is no default network manager like application. You can even convert all your wireguard client configs into networkd interfaces.
Best practice: Keep a personal log of various tweaks and things you’ve configured, and set up automated backups (more of general guidance).
Have fun!
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I found this article (and related site) from a quick search: https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/what-is-a-cryptocurrency
Binance has a vested interest in providing accurate information, they are a major exchange. The information seemed easy to understand and correct at a first glance, they also link to supporting articles.
Other references:
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency (among other more specific pages)
- https://jacobwsmith.xyz/stories/cryptocurrency.html (thanks wiby)
- https://dither8.xyz/blog/crypto-opinions/ (thanks again wiby)
I think the error is quite verbose and tells you everything you need to know.
Generally, do not install packages outside of a virtual environment unless you know what you’re doing. Given the option, use your package manager version of the same package. Outside of that, use your python environment manager of choice to install stuff. There are lots of options: conda, uv, venv, virtualenv, pipenv, etc.
The error exists to warn you that you could potentially break critical system installed packages by installing other things at a user or system level with pip.
You might consider trying Miniconda, a version of Anaconda. It installs a local python environment of your choosing at a user level. https://docs.anaconda.com/miniconda/
Just to let you know, Hexchat is no longer maintained, unless someone has forked it. Might be worth looking into alternatives.
Arch on desktop/laptop because I’m very comfortable with it, and I can set it up the way I like.
Debian on servers because it’s stable and nearly everything has a package available, or at least instructions for building.
Same as OP, but I’m not likely to change them out. I’ve tried a lot of distros over the years and this is what works best for me.