Tried out OpenRC on the main laptop running Arch (s6 as the supervisor). Great fun. Haven't played with Linux (as in configuring and distro-hopping) in a good long time. For the most part, things just "work", but having found that things "work" rather well
off of systemd as well, well, that makes me more confident in migrating to Void and playing with runit. And I've seen the musl stuff come a long way as well, so I think it's time. Just waiting for a drive to come in so I can back some stuff up.
I also had the time to spruce up my desktop and panel.
I moved to the offset branch of the xft fork for lemonbar, in order to replace what had previously been the Termsyn font, to Source Code Pro. Smoothed, antialiased fonts! Looks spiffy. Eats up a couple of MiBs more but c'est la vie.
I had removed the desktop indicates off of the left side during what must have been a year or two back, but I made the left icon clickable this time around. The time/date on the right side is also clickable, and spawns a "Scratchpad"-y terminal running Wyrd (ever since I moved to a paper planner, Wyrd and Remind have been getting less and less use, so I might just replace that with weather via
Wego).
In terms of the window manager, I finally finished cleaning up some bspwm keybindings that had been left unfunctional from the 0.9.1 changes. Now equalize and circulate keybindings are working again! I've also started changing the opacity of preselections with compton, and found a neat way to cancel presels by reapplying the same keybinding (credit to whoever it was on GH). I've also adopted a script I found on GH for double borders on windows. Looks great! I have a 2bwm desktop set up on a rPi somewhere, and I've always liked the look of double borders. I could probably extend the script and have the inner/outer panel change color during urgent, or when a window is marked sticky/private. Right now I have a seperate script that changes the entire border colour momentarily.
I've also moved to
xst, a fork of st. Generally, I do not mind the config.h way of compiling options in, so the main reason for moving had been the bundled patches. And for whatever reason, hintslight finally seems to be applied on xst. Most like it is an issue with X specific to this machine, from some leftover configuration.
Not very Linux-specific, but I've started using multirust for managing my Rust install. I've been building and installing from git manually all this time. I had considered trying out Nix to manage all of my local installs of language libs, but halfway through, I figured it wasn't worth the effort.
I've had rofi-pass installed for the longest time but never set up autotype options. What a timesaver! Now I don't have to type in my usernames (which have gotten increasingly longer...)
There are a couple of machines downstairs - the only one with Arch installed being a big honking desktop plugged into the TV, meant for watching movies, Youtube, and general entertainment. Yes, it's a waste of resources, but there's not much else I need it for. Although, sometimes guests come by and this is typically the machine they use when they ask for a computer (this has been getting less and less frequent what with smartphones being more common, but it used to happen all the time), so I've had a habit of setting up a traditional-looking desktop, with the panel at the bottom, etc, etc. Previously I had been using a stripped XFCE install, but recently I've moved it (and other installs with XFCE) with a lookalike setup running JWM. All I have to do is match the colours with the Arc-Darker GTK theme, and I'm set. Initially I had switched for an Openbox + lxpanel-gtk3 setup, but JWM comes with a panel out of the box and runs with the same amount of memory with that panel (8MiB, most of it due to Xft being enabled; Openbox ran ~8MiB and LXpanel ran ~13-20MiB). Sure, 8MiB is a mere pittance these days, but I guess old habits die hard. I've also moved from using inox-bin from the AUR, to a prebuilt inox using GTK3, to Firefox (Aurora, GTK3 build). And the circle is complete. I've really been enjoying JWM. We use it on Puppy all of the time without much thought, but perhaps sometimes we forget how comparable it is to the popular *boxes.
