In my prior ramblings, I mentioned grading and running Linux. Well, I'm still doing a little grading and messing with Linux, so it's time for part two.

On the grading. This will soon lead to a wonderful chunk of change, especially combined with OT at my main job. Most of this is being spent on wildly irresponsible (but fun) things. But we also have some trees in our yard that need to get trimmed (and in one case removed, or if my wife had anything to say about it, set on fire), so the rest is going to that. The joys of home ownership.

The exam is soon upon us, specifically this coming Tuesday and Wednesday. I can't help but feel bad for the people having to do this; it's extremely stressful and draining. After I took it, it probably took a week just for me to start feeling tired again. But since it's takes a couple of months to know if you passed, there's some background anxiety for awhile. Some people studied through the night before, but my rule was that I stopped Sunday evening (for a Tuesday exam). If I didn't know it by then I probably wouldn't (and you can't learn everything anyway), and meanwhile I decided I was better off not being warn out.

Adventures in Linux continue. Through an annoying series of events, I've changed distros from Debian to Antergos. Debian's refusal to use anything updated in the last 15 years was causing an annoying issue with my computer not suspending properly. It's probably related to the proprietary wifi framework (which seems poorly written, like most proprietary Linux software). But it does turn out that it wants a kernel version that is much newer than what Debian installs. I think Debian installs like 3.8 or something. Anyway, an attempt to update it broke all kinds of dependencies, and I was annoyed enough I decided to ditch it.

I dabbled briefly with Arch, but as I suspected that was a little more work than I was willing to do. But I'd always been impressed by how much better the Arch wiki is than Debian's, so I wanted to stay with an Arch-based setup. After a little more (brief) looking, I settled on Antergos. Graphical installer, still uses Arch repositories, and frequently updated. Despite Debian's reputation for conservatism, I've found Antergos to be more stable so far.

Which is not to say there haven't been issues. I was able to set up partitions fine (and it now boots off my laptop's SSD, which means super fast). But due to a quark in the installer, I had to re-do it a couple times until I figured out what going on. My video card uses Optimus, which is a way to jump between the built-in (Intel-based) graphics and the separate card. For whatever reason, Antergos' graphical installer doesn't handle this well, so if you set it to install proprietary drivers, it can't actually set up an X server properly. But disabling that option in setup and I was good to go. The only other issue I've had is with lightdm, or more specifically its webkit2-based login screen. Once I installed pipelight (a hack to get Silverlight to work on Linux), it broke. Thankfully Google on my phone + some command-line fu was enough to switch to gdm instead. It's a lot less pretty, certainly, but at least it actually works....

But in the meantime, the thing will actually suspend properly! Plus I like the more aggressive update schedule (to say nothing of the newer Linux kernel), and as i'm getting more comfortable with figuring things out, I like the greater degree of customizability that comes with an Arch-based distro. So here we are. My desktop looks pretty much the same as the screenshot I've posted before. I wish there were some better gtk themes out there, but meh.

Here's hoping this setup lasts longer than the last one!