Absences... Introspection... Reflection... Etc...

I think I've mentioned a couple or so times before that I write stories, which usually makes up a good majority of the time that I fail to write here on the blog. While I do like being able to be long-winded about the things I do with the theme of my blog (as much as I enjoy doing that stuff), it's difficult to maintain a balance.

I suppose in more clarity, I become more focused on something that I don't want to do anything else, or feel like doing anything else... Something like that I think.

Story-writing is indeed important to me (as you all are able to see with my periods of absence), but it is as equally important to me as all the projects and tinkering I do. I won't say "I don't have time for everything", but I will say that it's somewhat difficult for me to make time for it all when working a full-time job.

During my couple years of unemployment, it was nice to be able to do what I wanted to do, in between looking for employment, but there's so much tinkering that can be done before money becomes an issue. I remember having some project I wanted to try/make, but didn't have the money for any of the parts.

While I'm buried with all the projects and stories that I want to work on, I can't really curse work for it, as it is the catalyst that better taught me about electronics that has sparked many of my electronic projects; I'm sure it's fairly noticeable by now.

I definitely understand those who wish they had multiple bodies, as I do wish that a bit at this moment with so many things I want to work on.

Anyway, as I said in a previous post, I had gotten into Pokémon Sun for a couple hundred hours, as I was utilising it to take a break from the story I was mainly working on to be able to re-sensitise myself to a certain aspect of the story. But after things slowed down when I reached the endgame content for Pokémon Sun, I haven't been compelled to work on the story again.

I had started a couple other stories, one of which I finished since it was something short, but I still wasn't compelled to write. Eventually I remembered that I had quite a few updates to write about, and thus began my posting spree here.

Honestly, I was subconsciously hoping that I would be able to work on the projects I ordered parts for to hopefully "get it out", but things didn't work out that way with the relay on backorder.

I don't want to say that I'm going to discontinue the blog or the things I do (again, related to this blog's theme), but it does feel difficult sometimes to keep up with everything. I'm not entirely sure who or how many people actually take the time to read what I have to say and/or what I've done (since I don't really know how to interpret the traffic and view counts), but I definitely do appreciate it, even though I never see any comments/feedback or whatnot.

I doubt I will move my blog to a different platform either, since I feel that it's not going to be much different somewhere else (in terms of views, comments, and stuff), but if I do end up doing so, I'm obviously not going to migrate all 300 something of my posts (I think 300 something is accurate? XD).

I might give the "favourite links" its own page and remove it from the sidebar, since it slowly grows with the things I do... It would also allow me to give my description of the site the link is to. Might be a bit of a project, but I think it may be for the greater good of the blog  (Is there such a thing? XD).

I think I'm finished ranting. I apologise for speaking my mind a bit with something completely unrelated to this blog's theme, but I did want to explain a bit about my recent absence (as well as previous and future absences). It also did help me understand my thoughts and feelings a bit better, so I actually want to apologise if it sounded a bit melancholy and maybe a bit too personal.

Anyway, I'm done with my blog-posting spree for now, and unless I find an article to write about, I'll be back posting again in March.

Articles Backlog

I had quite a few articles saved that I wanted to talk about, but most are from so long ago that I don't feel it would be entirely worth writing a separate post for each one any longer, and it won't follow the usual format.

• Intel/Lenovo prevents Linux users from installing Linux on Yoga notebook:
• It wasn't the best idea, and they did remedy the problem, but hopefully they learned from it.

• OpenOffice devs debate retiring OpenOffice:
• Honestly, Apache shouldn't have touched it and left it dead. I haven't looked into this further since the articles, but I'm hoping they decided to retire it and let LibreOffice reign.

•  Apple Airpods:
• There were quite a number of people not happy with Apple's decision to pull the plug on the audio jack (pun partially intended), and there are other manufacturers also following the path. I do like having a headphone jack for headsets for when I do send/receive calls on my mobile phone, but I'll have to adapt when it's time to replace the Nexus 5X that I have. Other than that, it doesn't bother me all that much, considering I have a digital audio player for my music.

• Windows 10 Anniversary Update:
• Luckily I didn't become victim to this (Yay for utilising Windows less than one percent of the time!), but it still didn't look good on Microsoft to release a large update to have it cause problems on a majority of PCs.

• Overnight phone charging:
• I had always charged my phone overnight at 500mA to have a fully-charged phone for whenever I left the house so that the battery would last the longest time possible. Things changed with the Nexus 5X, since it uses USB Type C. Since the device communicates with the charger on the amperage it would like, I now use a Type C charger and let it decide the best amperage (whatever it may be).

• Ubuntu server hacked:
• The article is titled "Here's another really great reason to never touch Linux". The article title still gets me riled up, even though the article is written sometime last July. It seems like the writer isn't too familiar with the Linux universe, which is much more vast than just Ubuntu. Ubuntu is Linux, Manjaro is Linux, Fedora is Linux, but most importantly Linux is not Ubuntu. I would have been more settled if the article title used "Ubuntu" and not "Linux", but no sense in beating a dead horse.

Well, I think that takes care of the list that I can see from my saved articles. It seems like the articles I've been wanting to talk/rant about are slowly declining, but only time will tell though.

2017 Linux Distributions to Watch

The article I read is: The Best Linux Distros to Watch Out for in 2017

First distro in the article is Solus, and they go on to say that it's a new distribution that's not a derivative of some other distro and is based on the rolling-release model. While I haven't taken a close look at Solus (by perusing their website or utilising the Dell to test it), there are topics that come to mind.

First off is desktop environments and window managers, while the article doesn't specify about what desktop environments are included, it's usually best to support the ones that people can quickly become familiar with, ones that are lightweight, ones that are well known, and/or any combination of them. Over the time I've been toying around with Linux, I've used GNOME 2, GNOME 3, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, Unity, Openbox, and whatever Fedora uses. Taking a shot in the dark, I would think Solus probably has GNOME 3 and KDE as their "official" desktop environments, and then maybe LXDE and XFCE as their "supported" desktop environments. I could be wrong, but I'm not entirely in the mood to poke around Solus' website and find out for myself.

The next is the software repository... well, a couple things here, but let's just delve into it anyway. I'm assuming that they have some sort of GUI and/or CLI package manager specifically built for their repositories (for example: openSUSE has zypper, Fedora has yum, and so forth), and that it's not using one and/or based off of one from another distro (that would defeat the purpose of being a non-derivative, yes?). The other issue is with niche packages (the packages that have some sort of demand, but doesn't get prebuilt packages like popular packages). Does Solus walk in the same footsteps of most other distros by having their users manually compile these packages from source, or do they have something similar to the Arch User Repository?

Another is architecture support. This is always a major topic because it's not just x86_64 computers that Linux users install Linux on. Obviously I'm not saying that they need to support RISC, MIPS, and so forth, but they should at least support most of the popular ARM types if they want to "compete" with the other distros.

So while I do like the idea of a non-derived, rolling-release distro, I don't think it's for me. While Manjaro is a derivative of Arch, it is a very similar concept to Solus, and I prefer being able to utilise the AUR to automatically compile the not-popular-enough software that I use when it is updated (assuming someone didn't orphan it beforehand). Depending on the architecture support, it may become something worthwhile to me if it's something I can utilise on the Banana Pi, assuming it properly writes the boot data for kernel upgrades (with openSUSE Tumbleweed, I'm better off downloading the new image and setting the system back up than trying to utilise zypper to upgrade the kernel.

I do think that it should be great for most other users that want a rolling distro and not be using a derivative of some other distro.


Second up is Liri. While I've heard of the Papyrus project a bit, I can't say the same with Hawaii. I don't really have too much of an interest in it from the article itself, but I'll at least say that the desktop environment looks nice.


Next is LXLE. As a distro to revive old PCs, I'm somewhat interested in it, but in honesty, I'm more interested in PIXEL. I may give it and PIXEL a shot on the machines that are less powerful than Ziggy, but it will become a matter of which ends up being better.


Last in the article is KDE Neon. I've never been much of a fan of the KDE environment , since I had felt it to be awkward to use sometimes and a bit too much customisation in its appearance. While I do like making things nicely look the way I want things to look, the days of changing colours of every window aspect are long past me these days, and I just want a colour scheme I can grab from somewhere that fits what I'm looking for. There's a possibility that I may try it out to poke at KDE 5, but I highly doubt it.


None of ones in the article really struck me as well, since my needs are fairly met (with the old machines, ARM boards, and iBooks as the exception), but I will still keep my eyes peeled for something that seems would help me get closer to having my needs fully met.