Some Sway monkeywrenches. Some hyprland experiments

[Here are to be discussed problems with possibly HiDPI, or Wayland, or both, for Rawtherapee, and Entangle (flatpak).]

Trying out Sway, an i3wm workalike for Wayland

 A good move I recently made was to sell my MacBook Pro, M2; and purchase a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, several years old.  One of the best features of this new laptop is a HiDPI (High Dots Per Inch) screen with a resolution of something like  3200x1800.  It's a remarkable display for other reasons, which I will not go into here.  The blacks are incredible.  

 With my usual Manjaro i3wm, this means that the type is almost unreadable.  With the guidance of several source on the Internet, I was able to cajol the system into somewhat useful settings that most software works fine with.  Along they way, several references passed me by about Wayland, a newer graphical setup that X11.  

 

I am reluctant to make huge changes to a long time stalwart system, but finally I have begun to experiment with Sway, a workalike system to i3, and Hyprland, a fancier tiling window manager, working on top of Wayland.  Both, I am happy to report, work nicely with this  HiDPI screen.  

 

So I installed Manjaro's Sway edition.  So far, so good.  Now I'm at the point of trying to configure pop-up/drop-down floating windows for Kitty, Emacs, R, orage (probably impossible, but this is the best little calendar app I have found.  Once I have set the month, and popped it back up, the same month is show.  Very useful for calendar work), and a ham radio clock, that is actually of little use.  

HiDPI is not a problem.  

 

When I install a new distro, one of the first things I do  is set the user id to "1004", as well as the groupid.  Consequently, the home directory of my previous setup and user are completely accessible, because this was the case for the previous login as well.  I never duplicate the login, out of worry that the dot file tweaks will be incompatible with anything different.  

 

So far, so good.

 

Tools of Excellence: Cb2bib, Yazi, Sioyek, Entangle, XnViewMP, Emacs,...: WOW!

In the summer of either 1982 or 1983, I enrolled in a summer school class at UCSB offered by the College of Engineering on Computer Architecture.  At about this time two of my regular classes required the use of Wordstar, on a mainframe terminal.  I had been required to write a program in Fortran for a math course; now, in this Computer Architecture class, I wrote some minimal code in PDP-1170 Assembly Language.   Intel's early microprocessors---the engines that  would spark a revolution in Personal Computing---had come into being.   I had enrolled on a Pass/Fail basis, fearing that it would be a technical challenge.  I had enrolled later in an amazing  Invertebrate  Paleontology course, also Pass/Fail.  Both times, I would have earned an honest "A."         Yet another Lesson learned.  

 The theory behind digital computers, as it turns out, is straightforward and fascinating, logical and understandable.  I later came to realize that these systems, invented  by humans, reflected human logic; they are non-complex, a fact I understood more fully after being introduced to Molecular Biology and Genetics, and the extreme complexity of the Central Dogma  By the end of the short summer session, I had a tentative grasp of the nature of digital computers.  The graduate student instructor took me aside and advised that the knowledge I had gained in this brief introduction would be valuable in the future, and I would be able to advise others about what computers can do.  

 This advice could not have been more applicable when I moved to Chuuk Lagoon, and started a project collecting animal names in local dialects of the islands.  At the University of Guam Marine Lab, I was exposed to early Personal Computers, the IBM XT and IBM AT.  My basic knowledge of the workings of computing systems provided useful perspective for solving problems.  I eschewed the commercial/proprietary solutions, the high priced computer programs that would make the entrepreneurs wealthy.  

 I learned what I could and scrounged software of many kinds.  Except the big brands.  There are always other solutions that work better; those behemoths aren't worth the cost to society.  I believed this then, and I believe it even more today.  

 My Toolbox

Previously, I have written a little about Yazi and Sioyek.   They, like Cb2Bib and Entangle, are functionally remarkable tools.   Among Free Software users, they are not the most popular.  I also rely upon the highly functional, low overhead foundation, the i3 tiling window manager.  Emacs is a mainstay; like these other tools, the simplicity and functional design of Emacs makes it run circles around most proprietary software.  Windows is dumbed down; the stress of using such a dysfunctional tool might be likened to trying to build a cabinet using a jackhammer; a poorly made jackhammer at that.   I use LibreOffice from time to time, and some other more mainstream tools.  They are fine; but the workhorses in my toolbox are more special. The packages I am writing about today are truly special, and enabling. 

 

I as initially attracted to Free Software for financial reasons.  The story is too long to recount here.  But as I have come to understand the GNU Project, and the grass-roots nature of the development of these tools, it became clear to me that the Free in Free Software actually refers to freedom, not free beer.   

 

Sioyek

The PDF reader Sioyek caught my attention relatively recently, with its plain exterior, focus on research, and its  hidden gems.  For a couple of days, I returned to sioyek, after setting it aside a while; a closer reading of the documentation has given me a new appreciation of it's wonders.  And today, after some digging, I was able to configure yazi to open files in Sioyek, or Evince, at will.  Gradually, the levers and buttons of sioyek are revealed.

 

The documentation is relatively straightforward.   But I struggled with configuration.  Later for that.  PrintHere are some of the more interesting features:

• A keystroke sends the text at the cursor to Google Scholar (GS), or another tool I am unfamilar with.  A browser opens, Google Chrome.  Keystrokes are available, either standard or by a plugin, to download the pdf from GS.  
• Sioyek remembers bookmarks of two or three kinds.  A keystroke causes display of a list of bookmarks in either the current file, or all pdfs sioyek knows about.  
• One of these "bookmark" functionalites is called "highlighting."  Selected text may be highlighted.  The keystroke for highlighting must be followed by a single key, which represents the type of material.  So someone like me, whose mind travels in so many directions, can keep track of various threads of interest.  If several files are highlighted in this way, retrieval of highlights can optionally display all highlights of a given type in all files (globally).  
• The Global retrieval feature holds for bookmarks as well.  So if I am reading four PDFs that relate to each other, I can bounce around.  And selections can be copied to the system clipboard.  You know where this is going.
• Portals are something I don't yet understand.  I position may be set as a target for a portal, so as I'm reading I can refer back to a certain specific piece of text, diagram, table, whatever.  Backspace brings me home.
•  I was able to print.
• Sioyek is mainly keyboard driven; but scrolling with a mouse is possible.
• A "visual mark" (or whatever it's called) underlines current text if that is wanted; and this mark can be manipulated in various ways.  More to learn hear.
• Zooming is great.
• In PDFs text can be selected and various functions are possible.  A click on a figure number will take me directly to that figure.  This built-in feature seems almost intelligent, and it reminds me of snarfing references in Cb2Bib, a remarkable feature.  
• Synctex mode allows the latex source to be opened and followed when reading a pdf.  Wow.

Some thought went into this tool.  

 

Yazi 

Yazi is a console based file manager with superpowers.  I have gotten into the configuration details far enough to make it possible to choose which pdf viewer is desired.  Sometimes, I think sioyek may be too far out, for some things; so I set up to be able to open in either  evince or sioyek.  Shift-O opens a minimal menu; included here is a button to open it in a folder.  I think some more tweaking is needed to identify low-overhead tools like qutebrowser for Google Scholar searches, and a minimal Graphical File Manager with lower overhead.  My laptop lags seriously, but it's a very old laptop.

 

Yazi works swell with kitty.  Previews of jpegs and pngs, and possibly tiffs (with some tweaking) is extremely fast, and a plugin "zoom" feature enables the image to zoom to the full height of the window.  Image and PDF previews are useful.  

 

Bunny is an amazing bookmarking tool.  

 

A tweak in .bashrc (or .zshrc) makes it possible to open yazi by typing 'y'.  As a bonus feature, when one changes directory, then types "q" to quit, yazi leaves the console in the last folder visited.  

 

This tool is undergoing rapid development, and plugins have been known to fail after updating.  

 

I use this for editing filenames, with tags.  A filter function ("f") then makes possible isolating files with a specific tag, marking them all, creating a directory, and dumping all these into a directory.   

 

Cb2Bib

 

This is an extremely useful tool, to me.  I think I'm the only one who uses it in the way I do, to write annotations to records in my bibtex database, and print out annotated bibliographies on demand.  I write, for example, a call number of a book, and notes on pages, compile it into LaTeX, and print.  Very convenient.  The developer was kind enough to explain how to modify the code to incorporate an "annotate" field in the bibtex entry, and also modify the tools that generate a pdf, so an annotation is formated together with the citation.  

 

In this space, I hope to present instructions for the benefit of others.  

Cb2Bib also automatically picks up citations that are highlighted in other programs.  Also, one can copy a bibtex citation from Google Scholar, that is instantly picked up and incorporated into the database associated with the program.  

This program does much more than I am able to understand, but what I can understand, and do---with the help of Pere Constans---is amazing.  

 

This is another reason I don't stick to the commercial / proprietary software packages.

 

Entangle

 

More to follow. 

 

 

Tangled in Entangle: resignation to flatpak

Entangle is a wonderful program, an elegant tool---elegant in the sense of efficiency and design for function.   Daniel Berrangé  has written other uncommonly interesting  software as well.  This tool, which I run on GNU/Linux, flawlessly connects to my Canon DSLR cameras; I use it primarily for photomicrography.  What it lacks is documentation.  The GUI is not super shiny, but adequate.  

I have taken Entangle for granted for many years; it has installed easily on GNU/Linux Arch-based systems---via the AUR repository---and also on Ubuntu, as I recently learned.  However, for several months it has been a struggle.  On Manjaro GNU/Linux, my goto distribution for over a decade, building has been impossible, for me.  Because Entangle is so important to me, I moved to EndeavourOS, a distribution that otherwise is not my favorite; Entangle did build fine on EndeavourOS, however.  But recently, other issues plagued my EndeavourOS experience, initiating a devastating avalanche: my desperate flailings led to the loss of a 600GB partition, that had not been backed up except in some bits and pieces, with decades worth of work, now completely unrecoverable.  

Monofilament fishing line sucks.  Google's AI suggest some terms for  snarls of monofilament on a reel: backlash, bird's nest, webbing, or wind knot.  I have forgotten the more colorful term I knew long ago---explosion?  I had to cut the mono off of the reel.  (I no longer fish, out of concern for the health of the ocean, and overfishing).  This week's avalanche is another lesson, because the entire journey was unnecessary, had I but taken heed of the notice on the web page of Entangle: flatpak is the method of choice for installing Entangle:

 

At least I can now report that I am back to Manjaro.  Each of the other distros had other shortcomings; so does Manjaro, but in the main, it is most comfortable.

 

EndeavourOS

As a firmly committed user of the tiling i3wm, this distribution is clearly out of bounds.  I3 has been over-riced and the keybindings are out of sync with any others I have seen.  As one reviewer remarked, Endeavour''s setup seems more like a single user's custom setup than to reflect any functional vision.  I love it uses Archlinux's upstream repos (this is the most serious issue I have with Manjaro).  I can tweak it to my satisfaction, but the theming is garish and overdone.

 

Later this week, I attempted to install EndeavourOS again.  But the web site is down, and I was unable to download the install image any longer, or find the wiki or forum.  I think this is the death  knell for EndeavourOS.  It "couldn't have happened to a nicer distro," but it's sad that the reason turned out to be inability to pay hosting fees.  

 

Don't get me started about Capitalism. 

 

CachyOS

On Distrowatch CachyOS---a newer Arch-based distro---has snuck into first place, quick swiftly.  Reviews are quite positive.  The vision is amazing; a breath of fresh air.   I took the bait, and grabbed an iso.  The installation went well, or so I thought.  I even let out a joyous laugh, while installing it.  (Someday, this will be my fave.)  This is the ultimate functional distribution, even including a stress testing facility on the installation medium.  But when I booted the installed setup... crickets.  Black, blank screens.  After too much sleuthing---this past week has been all about too much sleuthing, no working---I found a plethora of complaints about this issue, on Nvidia GPUs.  The issue for me, as it took days to figure out, is that the GTX 1050 of mine is no longer supported by Nvidia; but it works on all other distros.  CachyOS has favored a newer open source driver (which I'm all about, but this new open source driver is not Neuveau.  It's apparently an officially sanctioned open source driver, but older hardware is still closed source, so are not supported.  

 

Curiously, once, after I yanked the HDMI cable to one of my monitors, test output appeared on the other monitor, connected by display port.  I noted a single mention, during my sleuthing, of the issue with HDMI.  

 

For now, this is the GPU I have  So no more CachyOS.  Too bad.  It was a real thrill to install something so fresh and cool.  I tried Manjaro again, but no luck with Entangle---and the module/drivers for my USB Wifi Dongle was not included with the 6.12 kernels, so I tried something new.  Or old.  The hard way. 

 

 

The Semi-Hard Way: Installing Archlinux

All of these "Arch-based" distros are fed by Archlinux itself.  I have installed Arch a bunch of times; and used various short-cut scripts and (of course) the arch-based easy way distros, like Manjaro, Antergos, and others.  I have done it enough times, the hard way.  On the forums, developers of Arch make much ado about the need to install the hard way as a way to learn GNU/Linux; but enough is enough.  The General Purpose Computer is a tool; I want to understand this tool, sure, but that is not my raison d' etre.   

 

Anyway, at this point in the trip down the abyss, I thought, well, why not go ahead and reach for the progenitor of these others, settle down, and bite the bullet.  I used the "somewhat hard" way.

 

Arch's installation iso images now include a script called Archinstall (or so), that is intended to make it easier to install.  I experienced a disaster of untellable proportions while using this script.  I had forgotten this, but some years ago, apparently, I had attempted to use the script, and had been stymied by the disk partitioning module.  Once something has been typed in to the widgets, indicating mount points, it is difficult, or sometimes impossible, to back out of it.  In this instance, I encountered other problems with the partitioning component of this script: I had mostly figured out the correct paritioning scheme, and eventually had them all in place, but once I had typed something into the wrong partition, it was impossible to back out, so I typed "/extra".  Who knows whether that affected our issue. 

 

The notice escaped me during the process that the partitions that were selected for the install would be wiped.   Somehow, it occurs to me that this notice should not be a subtle one.  I cannot think of another distro's install that does not take extra care to explain the consequences of similar actions.  

 

Not only that, there is a button, not clearly defined or marked, for each partition defined, to change the formatting status (ie, format as opposed to keep).  It is not only poorly marked: when I tried to install again using this script, it was clear that this button only switches to "format" and does not seem to convert back to a "keep" state.  The wording was difficult to understand, for me.  This, I think, is a bug.

 

Immediately after I clicked "install"  I saw the words "partition deleted"; I killed the install at this point.  Once I had taken a look at the system, using gparted, it was clear that this partition had been deleted and wiped.  Nothing I could do could possibly recover my data.  This only reinforces my sense that this script reflects a disdain for the user, so, arguable, it is a bug.

 

At this point I decided  to install Ubuntu.  I have had several problems with Ubuntu in the past.  Installs that led to blank screens on laptops.  But it's been some time.

 

Ubuntu

Ubuntu installed nicely.  It was a breath of fresh air.  But it's tedious to maintain and set up.  Many of the packages I install routinely on Manjaro are difficult on Ubuntu.  Entangle did install nicely.  

 

Final Chapters

At this point, perhaps four days into this waste of time, it occurred to me that maybe a binary package was available on the Manjaro web site.  What I found was the notice, above, that the canonical way of installation would be flatpak.  

 

Back to Manjaro.  What's to complain about?  It worked.

 

In Praise of Manjaro

 The issue with Entangle was a mirage; it does work, but requires installation as a flatpak.  I don't like this; hopefully in the future a new version will be released (it's been a long while) that will compile on today's systems.  But I can think of few or no issues over at least 15 years since I started using Manjaro.  

 

One think points to a high level of knowledge among the developers of Manjaro.  I have made it a habit to keep a separate /home directory and even /usr/local---for self-compiled software---so that if an issue does creep in, a quick installation of Manjaro to a different root partition will solve the problem.  Grub uses os-prober to locate other installed GNU/Linux sets on the same machine, and configure the grub startup screen to offer choices.  Only in Manjaro, once I have chosen a different partition to start up, does Grub remember.  This is not a unique deal; Grub makes this possible with a simple configuration tweak.   But this points to a level of attention to detail that is lacking elsewhere.

 

I might also mention i3wm.  I have a 2014 Thinkpad that still is a bit spunky, when not held back by an excessive amount of overhead from, say, KDE, Gnome, or even XFCE4.  It's a big deal.  My desktop is getting along in years as well; I think without i3 (or some other super lightweight window manager) I would have felt bogged down.  Not only that, i3wm is functional.  All of the ricing, all of the beautiful desktop tweaks and wallpapers, cannot compete with the beauty of a smoothly functioning machine. Also, i3wm is easy to configure, and some experts have provided great tweaks.  I have configured popups for R, emacs, kitty (terminal), and other tools.  Wonderful.

 

Manjaro, as an Arch-derivative, comes configured to take advantage of the AUR: Arch User Repository.  Using the tool "yay" (replacement for pacman), there are few packages that are not installable out of the box.   AUR packages compile programs from source, downloaded from git.  This is consistent with my inclination toward using programs in the manner in which they were written; Debian and Ubuntu, for example, provide patches for almost every package that alters the software in various---usually innocuous---ways.  

 

And Manjaro comes, out of the box, with development tools installed, so that for many programs, compiling from source is accomodated.  

 

I am pleased that I can now run Entangle, even if I must (drat!) resort to a flatpak.

 

One thing I do not like about Manjaro: the "repostories" lag behind those of Archlinux, the canonical upstream source repository, in the supposed name of security.  I like to run either the Testing or Unstable branch of Manjaro (I think one of them may not longer be supported), which is one step more up-to-date with Arch.  I blamed this for Entangle not compiling, but it appears I was mistaken.  

 

 

  

sioyek and yazi

I have set Sioyek as the default pdf viewer for Yazi; actually, probably for the entire system.  

 It was *relatively* simple to do this, after installing xdg-utils-mimeo.  I will not go back through that here, but it's not hard.  

 Sioyek has no native capacity to print.  This is a potential show stopper.  I have attempted to set this up from instructions from some random internet post.  The location of the user config files is in doubt, however.  By "reports," config files should be found in ~/.config/sioyek; however, other reports indicate .local/share/sioyek.  I did install a rather decrepid tool, a gtk-print tool (name?).  My config does not work yet.

Another potential downside relates to the use case for Sioyek, as a pdf annotation tool for research.  When a file is opened for the first time, sioyek indexes the file; this makes searches incredibly quick and useful.  Will this result in cluttering the system after a large number of pdfs are opened?  Probably another lightweight pdf viewer should be established as the default, to streamline the process of reviewing random files on the fly.  

Sioyek is uncluttered, as far as GUI.  There hardly is any GUI.  A fairly extensive set of utilities is tied to keystrokes.  Some of them are not exactly intuitive, at least to me.  

Some facilities:

• Bookmarking
• Search in google scholar (may not work right)
• gg -> go to page 1
• G -> go to last page
• rt click -> mark line (not sure this is working with a track pad)
• highlighting in various colors
• search highlights
• "Smart Jumps" to figures or references, with or without links: this didn't work out of the box, for me.
• mark a location, give character as a name for the mark.

 

Yazi is turning out to be extremely useful.  I use it multiple times a day.  Some useful tweaks:

• set a much larger preview size, then
• install a preview to Toggle full view of the preview
• somehow a special tweak was needed to view tiffs (this wasn't the case when I first tried yazi)
• bookmarks.  yabm (Yet Another Book Mark) is great.  Another one was incompatible, AFAICT.
• Zoom plugin
• In a tips section of the web site, is recommended to install some code in the rc file of the shell, which allows to start with "y" and that leaves the terminal in the last used directory, when quit with "q".  Extremely useful.

A problem: not really a big one: yazi is undergoing rapid and intense development, so incomptibilities arise frequently.   Especially with plugins.

 

 

Some recent useful software additions

 A brief list for now:

• dysk : concise "df" and graphic
• sioyek: interesting  document reader.  Keyboard driven, mostly, maybe. Designed for academic papers and textbooks.  
•  bpytop: A feature-ful process/memory/cpu monitor, text based; similar to top or htop.
  
•  

Notes on Yazi

 Yazi is good.  Real good.  I used it over ssh to cull a directory on my second system; it worked as I had hoped, except, perhaps, for color theming.

 Knock on Wood.

 Viewing/reviewing

One of the needs that yazi has fulfilled for me is rapid viewing.  I can only imagine that should I ever be able to upgrade my current machines (RAM and CPU, as well as Storage), viewing would be even more friendly, especially for images.  The ability to flip through a directory of images, mark, and move, copy, or delete marked files, has made a huge difference to my workflow.  The only other tool that is useful in this regard is xnviewmp.  I use a fairly simple set of commands; probably if I mastered tabs and other complexities and plugins, yazi would be even more helpful.

 

By the way, the terminal "kitty" has wonderful facilities built in to work well for viewing images.   I prefer the black background and contrasty color scheme to any other.

 Ranger was good enough, until it wasn't.

Copy, Paste and move and Notes on plugins.

 [Cautionary note: I have lost files through carelessness here, and yazi has some gotchas to be navigated around.]

This is pretty much self-explanatory.  I will try to address this topic in detail at some future time.  For now, I'll mention a plugin that has helped speed these processes: 

• yamb is a bookmarking plugin that works well.  In the absence of a much needed multi-step backup command, this does a good job when sorting through files and moving or copying them to another directory.  I have gotten around the mentioned limitation by defining  bookmarks for the current from directory, and the currently interesting goto directory,  I define a set of book marks to frequently used directories, as well.  This is an easy tool to master.  Like other plugins, issues have been experienced after updating yazi (it is under fairly intense development).  

• toggle-pane: This helps when viewing both pdfs and images.  It is possible to configure the mazimum size of displayed images (I'm not certain whether this works for pdfs) by putting this code into ~?.config/yazi/yazi.toml:

                       [preview]

                      # Change them to your desired values
                      max_width  = 1800
                      max_height = 1800
  

       Plugins are found on a resources link on yazi's web pages.  Other sites exist with plubins.

 

Filtering

Filtering is a wonderful way to sort.  It has been even more useful to me, because of a filenaming scheme I have adopted.  I stole this idea from Protesilaos's Denote system.  I have not found denote very useful, but the concept of tags at the end of the filename, before the extension has become a useful tool allowing me to sort files more rapidly.  Here is an example.

    Jones--2060--JargonInBiology__taxonomy_nomenclature_zoology.pdf

I have started avoiding underscores in filenames ("_") in favor of using them in tags.  Interestingly, I saw a web page or thread somewhere about tagging styles, and this is one of several.  I used to use a 10 (or so) character at the beginning of lines in a bibliography, where each position had a meaning.  So anything related to crabs would have "c" in the third position (12ctx8urt-Anon-Crabs of the world) would be sorteable by sorting by the third position.  The Unix (GNU/Linux) sort command worked excellently.  

 With filtering  in yazi, one can narrow down a large folder/directory with pdfs about taxonomy: "_taxonom".  Prot has demonstrated the use of regular expressions to sort even more specifically in, I think emacs dired.  To avoid filtering for "_" in filenames, one would theoretically use a regular expression requiring a "__" (double underscore) somewhere before the "_:" single underscore.  This is probably easy.  Filtering is easier, I think.  It may be that emacs would be better, but so far, aside from a couple of learning experiences, Yazi is working well.

Moving around 

In either the getting started or tips section of the yazi main web pages, is a suggestion that makes yazi more useful.  

Inserting this code into .bashrc (and I think .zshrc as well) makes things easy.

 function y() {
    local tmp="$(mktemp -t "yazi-cwd.XXXXXX")" cwd
    yazi "$@" --cwd-file="$tmp"
    if cwd="$(command cat -- "$tmp")" && [ -n "$cwd" ] && [ "$cwd" != "$PWD" ]; then
        builtin cd -- "$cwd"
    fi
    rm -f -- "$tmp"
}

Then, when in a terminal, type "y" to start yazi.  After moving to another directly, quitting with "q" leaves the terminal in this new directory.

 

A Caution or Two 

 Plugins are often not mutually compatible.  I have tried several others, but some collided with these few i do use.  

Some plugins iexplicably use keybindings that are assigned to other functions by default, and it is not always apparently what key bindings may be used.  <F1> may display a help screen, which may be filtered.  Filtering rocks.  Bookmarks rock.

 

2025 May 19

 

 

             

Further notes, after some time with Endeavour

 My initial impression of EndeavourOS/i3wm was a sour one.  Now that I have installed it on two machines, my positive impression of it, this time around, has moderated.  I may uninstall and go the tortuous route, installing Archlinux directly.  Not yet, but perhaps...

I could not do better in expressing my chief complain than another user (anonymous, I fear), who wrote a comment to a thread about i3WM on Endeavour.OS  In effect, this user remarked "It seemed more like one person's favorite custom install than a generally useful one."   Hear hear!!  Another user remarked that a seasoned i3wm user would find the customizations of the EndeavourOS tweak to i3wm, in effect, difficult to use.  

Other users pointed out that during the install an obscure checkbox allows one to skip EndeavourOS (EOS) customizations.  After installation is not a favorable time to learn about this, and it warns me against ever reinstalling this OS.

The OS is slick.  Too slick for i3wm.  Even the login screen is over the top, IMHO.

Another suggestion was to delete the directory ~/.config/i3 completely.  

What I have done is copy over, mostly, my config file from Manjaro.

 

Now I will mention the one thing that EndeavourOS does that works better for me, as I did in my last post: it used Archlinux repos out of the box.  Manjaro has taken pains to filter the repos so that they seem to able to go out of date, as I believe happened to me. 

I can see no need to continue to flog this dead horse.  I will continue to use it until I find time to install something else, probably Arch.  

EndeavourOS GNU/Linux: notes

 I have installed EndeavourOS, i3wm on two machines: a self-built/self-maintained PC, and a Lenovo S1 Yoga.   On both, as of now, it is working well, some 2 weeks in.  Why EndeavourOS?  I'm not sure.  I was experiencing some glitches on my Manjaro systems, and I needed to refresh the Lenovo S1 Yoga i3 installation.  In retrospect, after all of what I list below, it seems to me---though without having anything specific in mind---that Manjaro's i3wm flavor has fallen behind. 

Some key points:

• EndeavourOS i3wm edition incorporates a number of idosyncratic modifications and customizations.  This was my sense on previous short-lived installs, and it remains so, perhaps to an even greater extent, today.
• The first thing one notices is i3wm keybindings.  They differ in almost every respect from i3wm defaults, without, AFAICT, any particular reasons.  
  
• Installing  a printer reveals what may be a well-kept secret: the default firewall blocks a printer; certain adjustments must be made.  The "install-system-printer" tool, not an obvious feature, makes accomodations to this roadblock;  however, it may not be obvious to one who has been installing a printer by usual methods, such as starting up cups and opening "localhost:631" in a browser.  I, for one, was unaware of the firewall settings, making it necessary to chase down the differences.  Fortunately, I stumbled upon the script.
• i3wm's configurations file, located at .config/i3, sources a number of scripts in .config/i3/scripts.  
• The shutdown/resume/etc process found in, for example, Manjaro's i3wm edition, is implemented as a popup menu, via one of these scripts, powermenu, which requires a mouse click to activate.
• EndeavourOS exhibits a fondness for visual icons.  These are overdone, for example, in the powermenu script, and in the status bar, etc.. To my eye, these icons are distracting.
• EndeavourOS seems to reflect a trend toward modernization of i3wm, and perhaps other desktops.  
• Some defaults are welcome; others were troublesome, at least for me. 
• The installation caused some hiccoughs.  I don't remember them; I had to reinstall three or four times, for at least one of my machines.   

One serious problem I encountered during installation was the step, which I had overlooked, of having to choose between a BIOS and a UEFI installation.  This presented a serious problem.  I have never encountered this in any previous installation of Manjaro or Archlinux.  (I have abandoned direct installation of Archlinux because the learning experience touted by the developers has become a hindrance: after at least 10 installations, I have not learned them to any helpful extent; various versions of this process have presented, overall, significant hindrance to productivity. 

I was able to recover, for the most part, to a very nice OS, by copying over my config file from my previous Manjaro i3wm.  To be fair, this file has evolved over a decade or more, and incorporates useful tweaks.  Like Emacs's .emacs file, these tweaks---indeed the entire experience---remain relevant, without interfering with functioning of EndeavourOS.  Tweaks---mostly inspired by a series of videos from the distant past by Luke Smith, include:

• A dropdown terminal (using Kitty in my case)
• A dropdown Emacs instance---extremely useful;
• A dropdown terminal running R, for calculations
• A popup calendar: orage, a wonderful calendar, the best IMHO;
• A popup "ham radio clock," helpful for my calendar work.
• Two additional specific scratchpads, which I seldom use;
• Workspace flipping abilities
• custom bindings of kmag and kde-connect, which I use for microscope work.
  

 These features make i3wm even more useful.  I also customize other features, in minor ways.

 

Another personal note:  I always install on four partitions,  usually requiring some editing of /etc/fstab:

1. /
2. /home
3. /usr/local
4. /boot/efi
5. (and swap; does that count?)

 Using a separate /home parition over the past 15 years or more has helped me to recover when something goes haywire, and it has given me a consistent work and storage setup.  

 

I always use a unique user name; and change the user id to "1004" after installation, by dropping to a superuser virtual terminal before logging in, the first or so time; this renders all user files read+writable, so various work areas, like my "KEEPERS" top level directory, may be copied over instantly.  Group id must be changed likewise, and all files that are not owned by this user:group combination in the current (or other) instance may be harmonized by executing "chown -R newuser:newgroup ~/.

 

A separate /usr/local directory (or folder if one will) enables the ability to carry over programs I have compiled myself, to the new system.   I reinstall texlive using the package "texlive-installer"; this is a wonderful tool.  It is not necessary, but some links may not carry over.  I have been setting up the /usr/local mount by hand in /etc/fstab, because different installers seem to handle the attempt to create it during installation, differently. 

 

Other directories must also be set up by hand, for example:

• ~/Pictures (a large partition)

For now, I am happy enough.   In case of a need to reinstall, I would probably seek a distro that holds true to i3wm defaults.

 

Obviously, I am a fan of i3.  Endeavour would not be my first choice except that it seems well constructed and efficient.  The GUI enhancements are not excessive, but they are too much for me.

 

UPDATE:  I have followed some random advice to uncheck "opengl flipping" after experiencing serious lags upon resuming from suspend.  We'll see....  So far, no lag, but will try again.  

 Ok, I've tried it with only one application running, and things are fine.  What I had experienced were long delays, mouse unresponsive, when resuming.  Fingers crossed.

 

 

 

 

2025: I am still running on Manjaro

My history of distro-hopping between 1993 (or 1994) and early 2025 is worth a story.  The first time I installed GNU/Linux (on my Toshiba Laptop), the choice was between FreeBSD and "Linux."  I downloaded Slackware, through the kindness of the owners of Kuentos Communications on Guam.  I knew nothing of Linux, but after installation, faced with a terminal, I did not know what to do.  What I did was a head-scratcher: I typed "top".  It was a propitious choice: top is a system monitor that I still use in 2025, in it's  modern iteration, as "htop."  Slackware is still alive. 

 I did not install, Yggdrasil, even though it looked.

 At some point, perhaps 1995, I finally abandoned Slackware, for Debian, which was connected with the Free Software Foundation.    I stuck with Debian for a while.  One thing I noticed about Debian, and perhaps other distros further on down the line (Ubuntu) was the impatience of the developers who inhabited the help mailing list.  Instead of a simple answer, one would receive a sharp rebuff because he did not RTFM.  (Read the Fine Manual).  Another problem still persist, and has become even more egretious, IMHO: list lurkers who answer questions with "I don't know." 

 In about 1996, I hopped over to Ubuntu.  This was inspired because it was easier to install than plain Debian; but in fact it was a version of Debian that was easeir to install and maintain.  But Ubuntu was frequently problematical, for me.  Others seemed to be fine with it.  

Next was Knoppix was an interesting side-trip; I installed Cluster-Knoppix on three computers which I built for my classroom at Marianas High School.  With a student, we   actually got a cluster working, at least for a while.  Knoppix, in it's own rite, was easy to install.  It was possibly the first Live CD distribution, and it was simple to install onto a hard drive.

One issue that required constant head banging, was installing printers.  Even until this day, most printer manufacturers do not support GNU/Linux.  There are exceptions.

 Another problem has been incompatibility of software.  This was expected; however, the worst was software---often developed with Government funding---for educational use.  

It has been worth the trouble.

I do not remember when, at some point I started getting in over my head---with Gentoo. With Slackware, I had learned to install Unix software by compiling it from "upstream" source code; this means, the original code.  Debian in particular had painted this upstream code with another layer of patches, and generally made it available as pre-compiled binaries.  This approach was a little uncomfortable for me; I always had hoped for a distro that used upstream source code.  This brought me to Gentoo.  

Computers are tools.  I am interested in them, sure, but as tools.  Tools for functional purposes.  Gentoo's approach was elegant; but frequent updates led to collisions between library versions---especially with KDE's libraries---and routinely to gordion entanglements.  I install a large number of software packages, which leads to a large number of such problems.  The tedium started to bother me: the all night updates, the need to reinstall---often taking days---when things got too complicated. 

This is true: Gentoo had the very best documentation, by far, of any distro.  That was, however, until a fork in the road when developers went through some life changes that caused the documentation system---alas!  the distribution itself---to cease to be accessible to mere mortals like myself.  

Ubuntu was visited a few more times, and Mint Linux.  Neither of these worked for me.  Ubuntu---for reasons I never will understand---often abandoned me at a black screen of death.  Mint was not my cup of tea.

I landed on Arch Linux.   

Arch is touted as a learning experience.  Sure, it's difficult to install, but every user needs to learn the system from the inside out.  After many re-installs---probably often as a consequence of my own incompetence---I realized that I had not learned the lessons, as I had to repeat the same steps over and over again, cluelessly.  Eventually, though, I found Manjaro.

 Manjaro, IMHO, is the best of the Arch derivatives.  Manjaro (along with Arch Linux) will best be treated separately.  Suffice it to say, I have not hopped from Manjaro---save a few short-lived adventures with other Arch based distros---for well over a decade.

 

 

Unix's and GNU/Linux's Unknown Superpowers: ptx, sort, and grep

The Unix operating system is wonderful.  GNU/Linux is wonderful.  Let me make this distinction, before discussing the aforementioned three tools: GNU is Not Unix. This is a story of how capitalism limits the human spirit, in order to extract financial gain.  

 Before writing about the remarkable tools provided by Unix---and now, the GNU computing system (one of the scions of which is GNU/Linux)---one may be forgiven for visiting certain concerns, including the generation of incomprehensible wealth by a few men who now seek to control our lives in ever more of their detail.  I suggest that this wealth was made primarily through marketing, on the backs of the ingenuity of other men, some of whom were out-maneuvered and left behind by certain well known business men.  

It came about, during the early days of computing, long ago: a gifted programmer by the name of Richard Stallman worked at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MITAIL), along with other highly capable computer programmers.   Events during that period led to unforeseeable changes, as a behemoth technical-industrial complex grew beyond all imagination, based on deft slight-of-hand and shrewd business moves, as entrepreneurs snatched up computer code, patented and copyrighted it, and concealed it from hapless consumers.  Shrewd manipulations of programmers and code enabled a few men, in less than 50 years, to accumulate over half of the wealth of the financial world.  

This they were able to do by convincing consumers not to share, with the complicity of the legal "intellectual property" infrastructure; to violate the golden rule that many had cherished since childhood.  Make many copies of a useful computer program for a few pennies each, and set prices  arbitrarily high.  The consumer will be so mesmerized by the utility and flashiness of these programs that she will believe you are doing her a favor, selling it so cheap.  Convince governments to sign lucrative contracts.  Update products at speed, and charge for the updates.  Sue public schools when they did not update to newer licenses.  the profits would be almost unlimited.  And, now, change the business model and lease software, so leverage even greater control, and much greater profits. Never do unto others anything without transactional benefits to self.  Above all, do not share a computer program, even though they are useful.  This was a massive wealth grab. 

Tim Wu has written about the  entrepreneurs who built incomprehensible wealth by these same strategies: seize control of the media channels, prevent newcomers by various and nefarious means, and charge arbitrarily high rates for the use of this now valuable commodity:  information.    Radio. Telegraph, Telephone, and Television have been used to manipulate the public, by employing choke points---selective filters---to manipulate elections, gain power, and sell snake oil.  The political landscape has been altered in the interest of gaining more power, prestige, wealth, and control.  It's OK, these persons believe, to lie and deceive.  Today's politicians have gained success by following a model of radical "gas lighting," and in doing so have built empires  of corruption and greed.  

You may know this story. 

 Richard Stallman has been painted under the dark lights of deception as an extremist, even among other adherents to Free Software.  This is how the insidious tactics of industry and politics can influence our opinions to their own benefits.  The Petroleum Industry, in a similar manner, convinces us that global climate change is a hoax, that CO2 is fine.  Our politicians convince us, who are eager to consume their distorted and deceptive messaging, of these things, and many others.  We know they are lying, but the steam engines of their corruption are traveling down the tracks with such unrelenting force and momentum that they seemingly have taken over our own minds and hearts.  

 This is about one little part of the story. 

The MITAIL was at the forefront, in those beginning days of computing.  Richard Stallman was there; he noticed that the software interface of their very expensive printer was inefficient, klunky.  In the hopes of improving this interface, he kindly offered to the company that owned the patents,  to tweak the software and make it work better.  The manufacturer, however, was unwilling to open up the code behind that software, fearing loss of control and profit if it ware revealed.  

This is an important story, but this is not our story today.  Suffice it to say that Richard Stallman decided to do an end-around, in the finest traditions of human cooperation and sharing.  The Unix Operating System, owned by Bell Laboratories (AT&T), was an outstanding work of programming, a thoughtfully produced system of software, an interface of great utility, with numerous subprograms attached to a central kernel, making a whole that by far exceeded the sum of its parts.  But AT& T owned Unix. In the capitalistic world, this was a fantastic money maker.  But the cost of ownership was onerous, making it impossible for the average computer user to purchase.  And as Stallman had already learned, the impediments that proprietary software posed to even the best programmers presented various difficulties---even beyond simple ownership.  The experience with a printer had taught that lesson.  

And what about sharing these wonderful tools?  Stallman recalled an earlier time when the many talented programmers and users at the MITAIL had freely shared programs they had developed.  As a consequence of this open access to the universe of such software programs, even greater programs were spawned from the synergism...  But now many of those programmers had been enticed to leave this world by unimaginably lucrative contracts.  But  these contracts had been concealed within a trojan horse: the non-disclosure agreement.  The code, they promised, they would not share.  And even the end users, who purchased such programs today as Photoshop, Lightroom, games, typing tutors, graphics printing programs....  ad infinitum, are coerced into not sharing the software they purchase.  The industry is serious about this limitation.

So Richard Stallman reached out on the internet to propose a collaboration of programmers to build a new computer system, a free system, that could be "shared without dishonor."  Remember how Unix comprises a set of software units that are hook in to a kernel?  Those units include various commands: copy and move files, for example.  Even typing on a keyboard is handled by tools hooked into the kernel.  The construct, from a plethora of these units, is an Operating System (OS).  Such operating systems as the proprietary MS-DOS, Windows, and MacOS are example of proprietary OSes.  It is forbidden by the proprietors of these OSes to share the programs.  At great expense, these companies have constructed elaborate schemes to make it difficult or (they hope) impossible to share these programs.  

 Do you see where we are going with this?  This massive construct, including now Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, Oracle, Adobe, and others, has used a strategy of concealment, of forcing others to not share, to build huge empires, and horde wealth.  Intimidating the consumer, for example by suing Portland, Oregon's public schools to force purchase of contracts for every copy of windows that had not been updated, as "required" by the manufacturer.  

But GNU is Not Unix.  Richard Stallman recognized Unix as a wonderful model for an OS.  If thousands of programmers all over the world, connected by the Internet,  were to each write one or a small number of   utility programs, mirroring those that perform the functions  of  the Unix programs, while avoiding even any appearance of copying the Unix code, a new operating system could be built up through community action, a citizen-built computing system.  This system was successfully built.  Even a protracted legal challenge by the owners of Unix, SCO, many years later, could not find any copied code in the GNU/Linux operating system.

When I was isolated in Chuuk Lagoon, I had been conducting research that required access to computers.  My family donated a laptop computer, but the Windows OS was clumsy, and, to cut to the chase, could not help me with my project.  An editor that had been sent to me by a linguist at the University of Hawaii was capable, but it was "cripple ware," in a sense, and without the manual---which sold separately for hundreds of dollars--I could not proceed.

 

 The Free Software Foundation (FSF) responded to my request for an editor, sending a version of the Emacs editor ported to Windows, along with 14 disks of Unix tools, also that would run on Windows.  This was just what I needed.  Among these tools were a number of Unix text tools, opening a window into a new world of possibilities.  Very important to me were sort, grep, and ptx.  These, as far as I am concerned, are core Unix (hence Linux) superpowers. 

sort

Windows had a sort utility, but it was extremely limited.  In fact, the more I learned of the tools granted to me by the FSF, the better I understood the fraud that had been perpetrated on the public, corporate world, and governments by Microsoft.  I can liken the difference between the facilities provided by Unix (and later by Linux and FreeBSD) is comparable to the difference between a set of cheap carpenter's tools, and professional quality tools.  GNU sort is the Cadillac of sort programs, the Rolls.  

Later, on Guam, I was able to download a copy of the new Linux OS on Guam.  It was then that I discovered liberation.  From that day, in the early 1990s, until today, in 2025, I never never felt comfortable on a Windows computer.  At that time, one of the biggest differences was that Linux was capable of doing true multitasking, while Windows only could do one operation at a time.  With GNU/Linux I could type a letter while printing a different document, and running another process in the background.  Another difference was the Linux did not crash.  Let me repeat, it never crashed or locked up.  Windows regularly did so.  

grep

 

 I will not explain grep.  Today, in the 2020s, one can run grep on Windows machines.  Suffice to say that grep is a tool that enables searching through a set of files for a search term, and printing to the screen a list of matches. With pipes (signified by the character "|", one can direct the output of grep to another program, like sort.  Then, from sort, one may direct its output to less, a better file browsing tool than Unix's more, a tool that pages through a file.  To do this one would type:

 

    $ grep <filename.txt> | sort | less

 

ptx

 My need was specialized, as I was dealing with lexical text, lists of animal names.  To weed through these, I found ptx was incredible.  Ptx means "permutated index."  What follows is a small segment of output from a search of a text file about flowers and seasons of fishing. 

  /Luma, altitude 100-125 meters,   flower, August 4, 1921, Garber no./
      /\section{Burrows: a different   flower, and palolo.\hfill{}\textsc/
     specifically, he does mention a   flower.
     with certain things. There is a    flower called bust ginger;/    /time
      \textit{Erythrina\/} sp. as an      indicator species.            /about
        /constellation as a seasonal     indicator, he refers to this/
   a resident of Wonipw,/       This    indicator would only be useful to
   the/    /solar alignment as a key   indicator of the   emergence of
      /\hfill{}\textsc{whale:season:    indicator}} \label{sec:org5e260c7}/
     /tree fruits are ripe, it is an        indicator that whales are running/
Samoa/    /was used as a seasonal  indicator on some islands (e.g.,
  /2015, Trees of Yap:  sometimes   indicator of seasons} \label{sec:/
   . \textbf{Sometimes used as an   indicator of season.}       /flowers
   a resident of Wonipw,/       This   indicator would only be useful to
    /variegata\/} flowers in the dry   season, and has been mentioned (/
      and that it flowers during dry   season.       /of year of flowering,
      /these two periods the iéboua   season; the \%\%    season of the/
       /the iéboua season; the \%\%   season of the sun or heat iéboua-/
    /or heat iéboua-délat, and the   season of cold iéboua-tsiam.

tldr

 

Tldr (too long didn't read) is a modern innovation that summarizes the man page for a command.  In Unix, it was specified that who ever wrote a program must provide a "man": page, a manual to its use and options.  Here is output from tldr:

 

$ tldr ptx

  Generate a permuted index of words from text files.
  More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/ptx-invocation.html>.

  Generate a permuted index where the first field of each line is an index reference:

      ptx --references path/to/file

  Generate a permuted index with automatically generated index references:

      ptx --auto-reference path/to/file

  Generate a permuted index with a fixed width:

      ptx --width=width_in_columns path/to/file

  Generate a permuted index with a list of filtered words:

      ptx --only-file=path/to/filter path/to/file

  Generate a permuted index with SYSV-style behaviors:

      ptx --traditional path/to/file