StealthyCoder

I always have this sensation that I am forgetting to take something with me, or leaving something behind whenever I leave a restaurant, tourist attraction, a friend's house or going home from the vacation. Well it also happens when I move systems, distros or what have you.

Pop!_OS shenanigans

So I ran Pop!_OS from System76 for years now. I had a brief stint with Arch in the form of EndeavourOS again, but like I said in the past; You need a stable driver for your work life. So I ran this for quite some time, being quite content with it. They opted to go and make their own Desktop Environment (DE) named Cosmic. Which has been in alpha state for years now, it is slowly coming out to a beta point though. I am also using ghostty these days and I wanted to update it. I reran my zig command to build it and it failed. It needed a newer version of zig. No problem. I installed the newer version of zig. It failed again with the build but now it was a compile error. Something to do with libadwaita in the end, it needed to be a higher version. It is what is being used to make the actual widgets on screen in GTK based systems. Well I tried to compile newer libadwaita version from the repo, but it needed a newer glib version. I could not begin to compile that.

New plan. I happened to look at the Pop!_OS repositories and saw they now had noble alongside jammy. I switched everything to noble in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and started my upgrade journey. Well 1000s of packages, and about 5 hrs of running apt --fix-broken install followed by dpkg --force-breaks install, dpkg --force-depends remove and dpkg --configure -a later, I had a working system again. In the meantime I rebooted, and did not even get a screen. It was just black, luckily Pop!_OS has a old kernel entry in Grub and even a recovery partition.

Then I was greeted with the Cosmic desktop. I did not ask for this, but as part of the upgrade to noble you get Cosmic DE for free. Well needless to say it did not work smoothly all of it. The one thing that was possible now though, was to upgrade ghostty, only to find out it did not work anymore in this DE. When I switch tabs now, it crashes. Fantastic. Okay back to kitty, that also does not work anymore. Even worse. I find out Alt+` does not work anymore. I tried to dconf editor new short cuts for things, but the fact is Cosmic just did not code it in. So it won't work. Now I thought I could live without that, but no it turns out I use that shortcut all the time. It is to switch to other windows of the same group essentially. So between all your Firefox windows, or for me, all the terminal windows I have open.

Cosmic

It did look nice though. I cannot remember this now anymore, but I believe it did support different scaling on two monitors. Something I found out X11 does not do. It felt snappy, but also with a hint of uneasiness about it. I think they severely underestimated what it takes to write/implement a DE.

Before the big move

Well I wanted to keep all my important data. So I copied everything over to a spare server with some room and SSHFS mounted a directory to copy stuff over. Well actually I mv-ed things over first. That failed and then that made me lose some data already. Next I forgot the two most important things to copy: – SSH keys – GPG keys

Luckily I had my GPG key from my EndeavourOS disaster, and my SSH keys are not being used anywhere else other than my own servers which I can log in to and GitHub which is easily fixed.

So when I was installing my new system and setting it all up, that feeling of forgetting something crept up and manifested itself nicely and then you have that sinking pit in your stomach feeling of will this be horrible or not. It all turned out okay in the end.

Budgie

I tried out Solus Budgie a while back and I loved it. It felt so snappy, clean, and good. I thought if I ever have to move to another system, it will be that one. So now was the time. Sadly Budgie is not on Wayland yet. So that meant X11. I did not see the harm in this. Turns out X11 cannot handle different scaling factors on different monitors. So either my 4k laptop screen looks fine and my monitor is absolutely huge, or my monitor looks great but my 4k laptop screen is absolutely tiny and illegible. So I turn to Solus GNOME. It is wayland after install. I have customised it again to be all Catppuccin and I am cozy and calm again behind my laptop. The only thing I did not get to work on either ghostty or kitty again here are the italics. So then I stuck with the GNOME terminal, and it seems to be working now. I still like VictorMono as a font and I configured AstroNvim to have comments be italicized so they look all nice and cursive. You can extend this to function definitions and what have you.

Conclusion

I will probably always forget something, but next time I really need to save my keys. I am currently looking at my nice icons and cozyness that makes working at least a little nicer. An added benefit is that my Firefox is working again normally too. It can finally not stop breaking when I wanted to skip to a section in the video.