bee experiences linux (again)

WARNING!!! INCREDIBLY NERDY ARTICLE UP AHEAD

despite the arch linux button on my main site, i haven't actually run linux on the desktop as a main OS for a number of years, my last serious linux installation was probably over 6 months ago by now and after i finished installing it i barely ever touched it again. i decided the other day that i wanted to make another, honest attempt at doing a linux install. however, before i even attempted to install anything there was one, fairly big issue.

last time i ran linux, i was the proud owner of an RX 580 graphics card, it was an incredibly budget card and it had served me """well""" for long enough, so i decided i wanted an upgrade, and against my better judgement i decided on a NVIDIA RTX 3060. historically, linux and NVIDIA do not play super nicely with eachother in a fair amount of cases. i also decided i wanted to run a hyprland, a tiling compositor, which has "limited compatibility with hyprland", to quote the install guide / wiki

"There is no official Hyprland support for Nvidia hardware. However, you might make it work properly following this page."

(keyword here being might)

i also decided that since i had absolutely 0 idea what i was doing but also wanted a nice workflow / pretty looking system i would use someone elses dotfiles (basically someone elses configurations), i decided on running Gl00ria's hyprland dotfiles, as they had some tips for running on nvidia specifically and apparently ran smooth enough on the creators system, which was also running a nvidia GPU.

so with all that decided, it was time to start my install process :3

step 1!! actually installing the operating system!!

i wasn't particularly bothered to install arch to be honest, i've installed it manually more than once and i feel its not really worth it for me and i'd much rather waste my time later on in the process where it really mattered VS wasting my time getting arch installed at all. i decided on endeavourOS because its arch based (and also because its what the creator of those above dotfiles ran)

this was meant to be an easy step. just flash an installer to a USB, boot off of it, use the GUI installer and you're done! well, unfortunately for me nothing is ever that simple. the installer failed near to the end every single time i ran it and no amount of log file searching or googling could fix my issue. i reflashed the usb with a freshly downloaded ISO, tried again, still nothing. i just kept trying to see if some magical thing would happen and suddenly it would install but, that didn't work for me at the time. i was stumped for a long time, so i decided to go to sleep and try figure it out the next day. to which suddenly it just worked i literally changed NOTHING god i fucking hate problems like this like literally i did nothing wrong suddenly it just worked when it didnt for like a week? ok bud

ANYWAY, now that there was a successful endeavour install on my system it meant one thing

step 2 doing something with my install!!

sure, i had an install!! hoorayyy!!! however, it was an install that looked like this: this is not very usable, so i had to actually setup something from here. to start with was a Lot of waiting while i waited for pacman to install all the dependencies i would need for my install. once that was out of the way i just had to git clone the dotfiles repo to get all the files on to my system !!

issue: git clone failed me, for whatever reason git would just NOT let me clone this repo, it would fail after like 10 minutes and waste my time with an error that i couldn't find a working solution to online, so i needed to do something else instead.

step 2.5 doing something else instead

i had this genius idea, what if instead of cloning the repo which was STUPID and BROKEN, i just used wget to download the repos zip file and then extracted it!! how very smart of me :3

so i did that, it downloaded fine and i ran unzip, and i waited, and waited,,, and waited,,,,, and waited,,,,, and i dont know if i did somethign wrong but HOLY SHIT this was taking forever,, after about hour 3 and a half of waiting for this file to unzip i cancelled it and decided i needed to do something else instead,, again

step2.75 doing something else instead (again)

i decided to go back to my trusty friend git clone, but this time decided i would try use SSH to clone the repo because uhhh, why not

this worked, it took like 10 minutes i wasted three hours of my fucking life holy shit i shouldve just done that hours ago but oh well. i had the files downloaded so it was time for step 3 !!

step 3 configuration hell.

it should be easy right !! preconfigured dot files, just copy them to the folder and boom u have a really pretty install of endeavour + hyprland its incredible all configured for you!! so i did that, i copied them over to the folder, ran hyprland, and:

Well, this wasnt too good.

im not too sure entirely why, but it seemed that in the four months between these dotfiles being updated and me installing hyprland, they changed their configs and broke comments that had more than two hashtags at the beggining. Issue is these dotfiles have about 14 different configs in the hyprland folder and all of them have multiple comments that have "##########" as separators, so i had to manually go and fix each and every one of these config files.

next issue was my monitors, it thought that my right monitor was up and to the left of my main monitor, for some reason, that was a quick and easy config change though. after a few more hours of config tinkering and installing dependencies i missed before due to various name changes and whatever, so finally

i had done it, a functioning linux install with hyprland on my nvidia machine. Too bad discord barely worked on it, thank god for vesktop specifically on flathub (for some reason, natively it had the same issues as discord) for fixing my intense flickering issues.

so now that brings us here

step 4 enjoy ur install :3

now while i still face a lot of problems, especially with electron based apps, i fix them as i notice them and its been running decently smoothly, i tried to get games running (like osu) but gave up because they just,,, wouldnt work well at all (they stuttered to all hell)

there are certainly (more than a few) compromises to this setup on nvidia, but hey, it works for me now, and god is this configuration pretty. if you made it this far thanks for reading my nerd ramble :3, it was fun to write even if no ones gonna read it :D

heres a screenshot of my install by the way, its pretty cool :3