Category: Snac

“Sway” too long

Spent way too long last night trying to get #Sway set up on my #PineTab2 because:

1. The Arch dependencies for some of the optional components were broken (wmenu requires dmenu, but the package didn’t say so).
2. The Arch documentation for Sway is out of date and sends you to AUR for just about everything.
3. The documents I found didn’t make it clear that key bindings are the only way to launch things unless you explicitly add some other kind of launcher that’s not in the sample config. Or what to expect when changing the menu config. Or what the menus are supposed to look like.
4. Because of the broken dependencies, even when I tried to use the keybinds, they failed silently. For a while I wasn’t even sure it was reading my config file.

And now I’m like…why did I go to all that trouble? All I wanted was to make sure I had all the prerequisites to run a basic Wayland session on something lighter than Plasma. I’m just going to switch back to LXQt.

I miss the days when #Linux seemed to actually run deterministically. When I could see what was breaking easily and fix it easily.

I don’t miss all the extra fiddling and trial and error just to get something functional.

Sure, I like tinkering. When I want to. I don’t like to have to.

I think we might have had an Itanium box at Unitech

I think we might have had an Itanium box at Unitech, but then we had something like 15-20 various HP, Sun and other commercial Unix systems running different OS versions for building and QA. Though the IBM PowerPC was the last major box we added. Generally we all developed on Windows and would telnet into whatever arch/OS combo we needed. I do remember we had “the Vista box” and a couple other Windows workstations that were shared on an as-needed basis, and if we did have an Itanium, it would have been one of those.

Virtualization makes things so much easier!