I like to have documentation, manuals, wiki, examples and tutorials stored locally on my machine. It is great to use and can serve as a backup for future use.
My reasons There are multiple reasons why I consider it a great thing:
It forces me to think about what I am actually searching for and to try multiple keywords with similar meaning or with something related. While searching I learn much more than I originally intended since I often read more than just a single search result. It reduces my reliance on the internet services which can become inaccessible at any moment for many reasons. These reasons are alo many, is short: dead project, dead domain, changed address, paywalled, firewalled (CloudFlare), censorship, etc. Since I do not have to go on internet and interact with the mess out there it also protects me from nonsense written by modern people (I hope these creatures will not understand how to cripple my docs) or big corporations (AI buzzword nonsense). In short I am more independent and disconnected from weird world.
Intro My 10 years old laptop has basically touch and look sensitive connectors, audio jack included. This means that the headphones plugged status is changed at random and with default settings in PulseAudio and PipeWire it will cause constant switching to speakers and I will be unable to enjoy my music (the soundcard is not great but the USB hub is also out of question since USB ports are also often touch sensitive).
When I got a new computer a while ago I installed PulseAudio (PA) on it since I wanted to comfortably use USB headset and switching between it and my system soundcard. PA worked somehow fine but there where some problems with my favourite music player (Music On Console) but it could be to some degree mitigated with a patch.
Later Archlinux pushed PipeWire as hard dependency of few packages I had installed (namely kwin and PulseEffects). I can remove kwin safely since I do not use KDE/Plasma and had it for testing and as a backup, but it is really a pity that PulseEffects would be gone since it is great program to play with audio effects on the fly. So switching back to pulse would get rid me of these nice programs (unless I hack the packages which is another work, so why to bother?). The other huge issue with PipeWire is that it has some problems with playing audio.
When I start playing (or seek) some video it plays noise for a while until it catches up with something which is pain since PipeWire was advertised to me as a drop-in replacement for PA but it sucks even more.
In mt opinion systemd is a huge pain.
SystemD in my eyes is a tool developed by corporation (RedHat) for other corporations (their customers). RedHat guys (and other kinds) have many things (tools, configs, manuals, trainings, webinars…) prepared for it and thus it would be pain for them to stop using it.
Other corporations like it because it has support from other corporation which they can call when there is a problem and it is mostly one package which contains almost all basic stuff they will need. I see this as major selling point for it since huge corporations do not wish to play with small things, for them it is better to spend more money and buy something. In other words, it can give a lot of people work and thus a good livelihood.
Few years ago (4 or 5 I think) when I was downloading music in a hope of a higher quality the content was delivered in a 3 files, flac, cue and log. The flac file contains whole CD or album, cue is to describe where/when each song starts, ends, its name and author etc and log is a log from the program which made it.
This is all nice and great if you are using some more complicated music player with library function which can create index of the songs contained in such files and play them accordingly from its UI. But as a believer that GUI is bloated I am using Music on Console player which does not have this function and is strictly reading files (so I think). So I needed to split this huge file and extract each song with correct tags.
Some time ago on #artix IRC channel popped up a question on how to get the installed size of all packages in given repository and I together with other people on the channel created a one liner in shell to do exactly that.
But before I have to mention that Pacman prints the “Installed size” value when we try to install packages. So one way is to try to install all packages but this can also include dependencies and may require some pacman magic which I am not aware of. I forgot to mention, this method may require root access or sudo privileges which is not good enough for me.
My another attempt to break the habit of being up until very late into the night and as such very tired the next day.
For years I thought of configuring my computer to suspend at around night time so I will be somehow forced to go to sleep. Well, the main problem with this was that I only thought about it and never actually did any research on this subject.