The Linux For Everyone channel, founded by Jason Evangelho today posted an excellent commentary, written by Alan Diggs on the recurring challenges of the toxicity in the Linux community.

It is no secret that my favorite distro for Linux after much trial and error, landed on Arch Linux.

I found I prefer the rolling release model vs major version upgrades and the AUR (Arch User Repository) is incredible for finding and installing packages. That being said, it’s biggest win is the Arch Wiki. I find however, that no matter how often that is repeated in the Arch circles, you still find forums full of solutions that the Arch Wiki covers better, or even conflict the Wiki.

While all my personal systems are exclusively running Linux, as is the nature of working in most IT Support roles, the base of my shared company workstation in the office is Windows 10.

After a bunch of article reading, research and testing, this is a quick summary of what I use to have what has worked for me as a fully functioning i3 graphical desktop, running via WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) on a functioning X-Server. For me at least, I’ve found it works much better than when I tried to have a VM running on the workstation, as it’s far from new or high performance.

As I have continued my expansion into self-hosting as well as the fediverse, the one challenge I still had was image posting and sharing in an easy and clean looking way. For images on websites like this, especially from a mobile device, FTP uploading has just been inconvenient and disrupts the focused writing activity.

I had already dabbled a bit in Pixelfed, by joining Pixelfed.Social when it was still open for registration. This let me test the functionality for a service similar to Instagram or Imgr, but without ads or tracking. The final leap was setting it up self-hosted so that I could fully own that image data.

Among the #self-hosted projects that I run just for my own usage, I have a VPS server running Arch Linux. (Yes, I’m running an Arch server, instead of Ubuntu/Debian)

That little VPS runs a few different services:

• Minecraft server for a group of friends, which is the heavy memory user
• Write Freely instances for a few subjects
• Subsonic Music streaming server
• Resilio Sync encrypted storage target
• MiniFlux RSS Server/Reader

When I first really transitioned into the Linux world from Windows, I started with Ubuntu. That is a very common introductory point for many, or was, and from there I was an aggressive distro-hopper. I shifted through the Kubuntu’s and Xubuntu’s of the day, into ArchLabs on one laptop. At some point about two years ago took a stop at elementary OS in it’s 0.4 version (just one version before 5, they dropped the decimals).

Why couldn’t I just be fine with Nano and Sublime Text? I guess I can’t help but be curious!

Up until a few days ago, my previous experience with VIM was limited. I’ve been using Linux heavily for years now, and it was just an annoyance. In the past my only exposure to VIM was AUR install scripts or source builds that forced me to check build files via VIM. What that really meant was it was that annoying text program, that I had no clue how to quit when it suddenly was on my screen! :w to save, and :q to quit, but not if your in insert mode…what?