Hamartiogonic

Thanks. I should really look into automatically updating the mirrorlist. I’ll start with reflector and the others you mentioned.

Did you craft a very unorthodox and complex system? If so, I can believe you.

However, I went with a very traditional system with ext4, no fancy partitions, X11 and Gnome. I didn’t want my system to have anything experimental, because I knew I had to learn a bunch of stuff anyway. Just made everything as simple as possible, so that I can understand what’s going on.

So far, there hasn’t been a lot of system maintenance. Obviously it’s still more than what a Debian system would require, but nothing too crazy.

If you’re already an admin at work, you might not want to do any system administration at home. Well, until you find out that Microsoft is making some obnoxious decisions on your behalf, that’s when you suddenly find the motivation to do some research and tweak a bunch of settings. Situations like that will also lead to frustrating moments when you find out that your hands are tied, and you end up looking for workarounds. Spoiler: It doesn’t get any nicer after that.

On the other hand, if you’re running a system that requires you to take responsibility, a lazy admin will end up in frustrating situations too. It’s not that simple to balance these things. You need to know what your priorities are and what kind of sacrifices you’re willing to make.

As a lazy Arch user, I can tell you that there will be frustrating moments, but not that many. Mostly you’ll be fine, but be prepared for minor annoyances.

Features

If you didn’t install it, it’s not on the system. That’s good for a minimalistic system, but frustrating for a lazy admin. Once you’ve ironed out all the issues you encounter during the first few months, the system should be pretty solid and worry free. However, once you encounter a new situation, you have to do your research, and install (and maybe even configure) that one missing thing. Later down the line, this becomes increasingly rare, but never disappears completely, so be prepared for minor annoyances like this.

Interventions

Before updating, check the official site for big news. Some rare updates require intervention, so you should know what you’re doing before updating your system. Usually it’s totally fine, and you can run the update command blind folded. It’s definitely not recommended, but it’s not going to destroy a simple installation any time soon. If you do complex stuff with your system, the updates become more frustrating. However, once you break your grub this way, you’ll learn to read those notes before updating. These things don’t happen often, but once a special update like that does roll out, you’re going to find it frustrating. Could take a few years, so you don’t really need to worry about it today. Just know what you’re getting into.

Updating takes a while

I update roughly once a week, but occasionally only once a month. Maybe there’s something wrong with my connection or settings, but I get timeouts all the time. As a result, I ended up just using the no timeout option instead of actually doing my research and looking into this problem. Need to take that deep dive one weekend eventually. One month worth updates is also a lot of data to download, and I’m getting 0 kb/s for several minutes at a time, so it takes even longer. A lazy admin suffers from annoyances like these. Be prepared for something similar to happen to your system sooner or later. Probably takes only 30 minutes of reading and two commands to fix, but I’ll get around to it another day. Before anyone asks, yes, I’m using a list of the fastest servers, and no, I haven’t updated that list in months.

I still have Arch on my main laptop, but recently I replaced the Fedora of my HTPC with Debian. I just can’t be bothered to spend a minute on system maintenance, so Debian is better suited for that purpose. I’m still going to stick with Arch for reasons I don’t even fully understand. Probably just sunk cost fallacy at this stage…

Interestingly, that’s what someone said in the last post that claimed that people are doing it wrong. So, now we have two opposing claims, both of which are actually popular according to some people. Maybe half the world believes the other half is doing it wrong?

Maybe there is a a marginal belief which is truly unpopular. How about not voting at all? How about an even more obscure method where you never touch the upvote, but only selectively downvote specific posts that deserve to be buried?

I’ve been thinking about these buttons, what they do, and what do I want to convey when using them. Just using them to convey what I agree or disagree with comes quite naturally, but I don’t think that’s the best way to do it.

IMO a better way would be to upvote when I believe that more people should see this post or comment, and downvote, when the society as a whole would benefit if fewer people saw this stuff. I may personally disagree with something, but still believe that this stuff is good for other people to see. It’s all highly subjective, so clearly right or wrong answers in this regard are bit rare.

What would be a better way to use those buttons?

So… no superposition, entanglement, tunneling or teleportation in macroscopic scale. ☹️

But what about cutting steel with a plasma torch? Could you see macroscopic results of particles doing counterintuitive quantum stuff?

Next try to calculate what it would actually mean to make that much water follow a path like that. My guess is, it’s going to get very spicy.

“went viral on X this past week”

Wait, they are not using the official “previously known as Twitter” phrase anymore? World is really changing fast.

Having seen enough exceptions in biology, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone found a multicellular bacterial species that violates everything we know about bacteria. Biology is completely wild, and it’s really hard to come up with a rule or a category that always works and nobody has any problems with it.