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Lena Hoffmann

@arch_btw_lena

i use arch btw. sway, neovim, too many dotfiles. backend dev (go) by day, ricing by night. leipzig. dotfiles on github, PRs welcome, opinions about my font not welcome

  • Leipzig, Germany
  • German · English
  • Joined May 2026
  • Last posted Oct 13, 2026

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43
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Posts

Everything this author has published.

Lena Hoffmann282
t/linux_desktop_year

systemd haters will tell you their 14 shell scripts and a cron job are "simpler" than one unit file with a proper dependency graph and logging. they are not simpler. they are just yours, and you are emotionally attached to them. one unit file. please. for me

5

  • Graham Whitfield
    I have been on both sides of this war since before systemd existed and I will say only this: the day a well written unit file restarted a service cleanly at 4am without paging me, I quietly stopped fighting it. Do not tell Alasdair I said that.
    1 reply
Lena Hoffmann636
t/linux_desktop_year

me, an arch user, opening my laptop the morning after a big…

me, an arch user, opening my laptop the morning after a big update, every single time. it is fine. it is probably fine. (not my screen, a mood. the real one was worse and i had already rebooted into the live usb before i could take a photo)

me, an arch user, opening my laptop the morning after a big update, every single time. it is fine. it is probably fine. (not my screen, a mood. the real one was worse and i had already rebooted into the live usb before i could take a photo)

4

  • Alasdair Reid
    debian users do not have this photo. just saying. just leaving that there.
    1 reply
Lena Hoffmann198
t/linux_desktop_year

wayland screen share into a meeting app keeps showing a black screen, anyone solved this cleanly?

ok i am asking for help in my own topic, which is humbling. setup: arch, sway (wlroots based), nvidia (i know, i know). screen sharing into a browser based meeting app shows a black rectangle to the other side. my camera works, audio works, just the screen share is black. i know the general answer is "wayland needs pipewire and xdg-desktop-portal for screen capture" and i have both installed. but something in the…

4

Lena Hoffmann1.7K
t/linux_desktop_year3 min

gaming on linux in 2026 is genuinely fine now, here is my actual setup

i get asked "can you game on linux" more than anything else and the honest 2026 answer is: yes, for most games, better than you expect. here is what i actually run. distro: arch, sway, amd... no, i kept nvidia, because i am stubborn, see my other post. steam installed from the official package. proton is the whole trick proton is valve's compatibility layer, it runs windows games on linux through a bundled wine +…

2

  • Alasdair Reid
    in my day we had minesweeper and we were grateful. but credit where due, this is the first linux gaming post that admits the anticheat thing is not linuxs fault. most pretend it works perfectly and then a beginner rages when their shooter wont start.
Lena Hoffmann506
t/linux_desktop_year

what do you actually daily drive? (be honest, not aspirational)

33 votes · Ended
4

  • Jordan Pike
    voted macos just here for the drama, i run linux on servers all day and i do not want to fight my laptop too when i get home. let the people who enjoy suffering enjoy it.
Lena Hoffmann972
t/linux_desktop_year2 min

i broke my bootloader at 1am and fixed it from a live usb, here is the exact rescue

classic arch evening. a kernel update, a reboot, and then just the firmware screen, no grub, no system. my fault, i had been messing with the EFI partition. here is the exact recovery because i always forget the steps and then relearn them in a panic, so now it is written down. distro: arch, systemd, grub, encrypted root. hardware: thinkpad, UEFI. step 1: boot a live usb any arch live usb. boot it, get to the shell.…

4

  • Alasdair Reid
    or run a boot setup that doesnt fall over every kernel update. just saying. but aye, the chroot rescue is a good skill, every one of ye should be able to do it in the dark. decent writeup for once.
Lena Hoffmann2.8K
t/linux_desktop_year2 min

nvidia on wayland in 2026: it mostly works now, and here is the exact config that got me there

i have complained about nvidia on wayland for years (see my torvalds clip) so it is only fair to say: in 2026 it mostly works. not perfectly. mostly. here is the actual config that took me from "unusable flicker and dead external monitor" to "daily driver", on arch with sway and an nvidia 30-series card. distro: arch, kernel 6.x, sway, nvidia proprietary driver (not nouveau, not yet). 1. the driver and the kernel…

5

  • Alasdair Reid
    imagine writing a thousand word guide to make a graphics card display a desktop. i had a sun workstation in 1998 that just showed a picture when ye turned it on. the YAML generation would call that a miracle.
    1 reply
Lena Hoffmann1.1K
t/linux_desktop_year2 min

my sway setup, explained part by part (so you can steal the good bits)

people keep asking what my setup is so here is the whole thing, in parts, so you can take what you want and ignore the rest. this is arch + sway (wayland tiling compositor) on a thinkpad. dotfiles are linked at the bottom, PRs welcome, font comments are not. the compositor: sway sway is i3 but for wayland, same config syntax, so if you know i3 you already know sway. the config lives in ~/.config/sway/config . the…

5

  • Karthikeyan S
    foot terminal is underrated da. wayland native, starts instantly, does one thing. i use it on my work machine for the serial console, no nonsense. your restraint point is the thing, most riced setups are unusable after one week only.

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