Linux Setup

My Linux Setup

Here i'll detail my linux setup, including why i use linux, how i've set it up and issues i faced.

Why use linux?

I pretty much exclusively use free and open source software, and the operating system that I use is very much the most important part of that.

This is primarily because of the privacy benefits, i don't like the idea that any old corporation has access to my computer, but also the idea that the software on my computer has been created by a community effort. idk, it just seems kinda cool to me.

Setup

Choosing a distro

My daily driver is a Gigabyte Aero 15 laptop, with a NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics card in it, so any old linux distro was not going to be sufficient, as the proprietary drivers that the card requires are often a pain to set up on linux.

I have a big issue with pretty much all debian-based distributions of linux, it being that i seem to lock myself in dependancy hell very easily. This is probably because I love to install software from all corners of the internet and often the libraries bundled with these distros are either out-of-date or otherwise unsupported.

So the target distro would have to be Arch-based. I have never been able to setup Arch Linux using the command-line based install wiki page on bare metal, and I am slightly too impatient to try repeatedly. A side effect of having an arch-based distro is gaining the use of the arch wiki, which is, in my opinion, the best resource in the linux community.

As I have a NVIDIA graphics-card, a gaming-optimized distro is ideal, as often these will come with NVIDIA drivers and utility software out-of-the-box.

I have a preference for the KDE Plasma desktop environment, rather than GNOME or other desktop environments or window managers. This preference is due to it's sheer customizability, as i dislike GNOME's (and other desktop environments) lack of appearance options, and window managers are usually too optimized towards power-users for me to be able to use them comfortably.

Due to these specifications, I chose to go with Garuda Linux. It has a ton of custom utilities to help manage the system, and an excellent community wiki & forum.

Installing

Garuda Linux uses the Calamares installer, so installing Garuda linux was very easy. The install image that i chose (KDE Dragonized) comes with NVIDIA drivers out-of-the-box, and these were included and enabled in the finished install.

First time set-up

Garuda linux comes with a first-time setup assistant that prompts you on what additional software you want on your system, so that was helpful.

Theming

My desktop setup has two horizontal panels, one on top, and one on the bottom. The one on top holds the system tray, the system clock, a system monitor, a netspeed widget and the virtual desktop pager on the right of the screen, and a user session prompt widget on the right. The one on the bottom holds a application menu, a virtual desktop pager and the open windows on the left, and a small show desktop button on the right. This bottom panel can also be covered by windows, where the top one cannot. I find that this takes the best interface designs from macOS and windows for me. I primarily use KRunner to open applications, rather than any menu, mostly because of the very convienient alt-space keybind.

The theme that i use is just the basic Breeze dark theme, with the CDE window decorations, and a accent color of #9847c1.

Issues

Hibernation

UPDATE: it brokey :(
I mostly followed the arch wiki's guide to setting up hibernation on arch linux when using a btrfs swapfile. I used this link: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1206157/can-i-have-a-swapfile-on-btrfs#1206161 to set up the swapfile
however just following this didn't properly set up hibernation. The computer would hibernate, but would freeze when being started again. I had to run:
sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/DSDT | grep -i 'windows ' | sort | tail -1
and store that string in the grub config file. (looking at it now i cannot find where it is)
I also ran:
yay -S aic94xx-firmware linux-firmware-qlogic wd719x-firmware
to install misc firmware packages. I don't know whether this helped or not.
I also edited the systemd-logind.service files to remove the systemd swap check, as systemd cannot find the correct physical memory address and size properly on btrfs (these are set up in /sys/power/resume and /sys/power/resume_offset, more details in the arch wiki hibernation page), and if it thinks that there isn't enough space to save the RAM to disk, it will not allow hibernation.
I also installed the default linux kernel (along with linux-headers), and I don't know if that helped (Garuda linux by default uses the linux-zen kernel), but i installed it around about the time where hibernation got working, so idk.
Helpful Links

KDE Plasma's Desktop Configuration Not Saving

I had an issue where if i relogged into the desktop, all the positions of the icons on my desktop would be reset.

This one was an easy, if not slightly annoying fix. By going into my .config folder and deleting plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc, it reset all the desktop theming options, including my panel setup, but it did fix the desktop icon positions.