Cheat Sheet?

You may have noticed a new link appear in the above navigation menu (and another item disappear... more on that later), called EndeavourOS, which points to a 'cheat sheet' document I've been editing over the last couple years (now converted to html). I originally stored the document on a backup drive, updating it as a personal resource whenever I flashed one of my computers. But now, with me having this website, I felt this would be a better location to store this document. This will make it easier to access (such as using my phone) during the flashing process (and less likely to accidently delete it). A bonus, of course, is I can now share this information to anyone, which may be helpful to someone out there potentially diving into the world of Linux.

The What and Why of EndeavourOS?

The What

I'll let wikipedia do the heavy lifting... but in a nutshell, it's a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux.

As for The Why

I've been playing around with the Linux operating system (and it's various distributions) on the side for quite some time now (mostly Ubuntu on spare machines or Raspberry Pi OS on.. you guess it, Raspberry Pi's), but when Valve released the Steam Deck and showed that it was a viable alternative to gaming on Windows (which, is what I mostly do), I decided to 'take the plunge' and go full into the world of Linux.

My initial plan was to wait until Valve released SteamOS for PC's (since, at that time, I was becoming familiar enough with it's usage and hoped it would make the transition more seamless).. but when it became apparent that a desktop version wasn't going to happen anytime soon (outside of the few unofficial release channels), I decided to see what other alternatives were out there that could satisfy that 'easy to setup and use' approach, which eventually led me to EndeavourOS.

While not identical, because both use KDE Plasma as their desktop environment* (and both are Arch based distributions), the overall experience has been roughly the same (with the biggest difference in how each installs new programs or packages (EndeavourOS uses Pacman / Yay while SteamOS has access to KDE's Discover feature)). My take away so far is EndeavourOS feels closer to what I would expect from a desktop primary experience, with the ability to do gaming on the side. While Steam Deck's SteamOS seems like it would be focused more on the console gaming experience, with a desktop option on the side. Which, for me, means EndeavourOS has become the exact option I was looking for.

But from a bigger picture point of view, I've been wanting to get away from Windows for awhile now. Ever since I started messing with Ubuntu on my server machines, the idea that I could use an alternative OS (that was free and community driven) has always fascinated me... especially more recently, with Microsoft making some questionable design decisions for their current and upcoming Windows releases that.. concern me. However, the main thing that was always holding me back from fully committing was my ability to do PC gaming (and my ability to make games easily on the Linux platform). When I switched my primary development engine to Love2d a few years ago, that solved the game development department.. so then it just came down to gaming, which Valve (with Proton) has been continually improving on over the years.

That said, it's not perfect. There are quite a few titles I've had to skip entirely on because they just don't work on this setup (usually recent AAA games with some form of anti-cheat or similar systems in play). Also, you are effectively locked into using Steam's ecosystem when it comes to gaming (unless you have the technical know-how to setup a Proton environment outside of Steam). Hopefully, as the Linux platform matures and more people make the switch, we will start seeing more natively made games that won't require Proton... but for now, it's a very nice option to have.

* EndeavourOS does allow you to select from a variety of desktop environments, if you wish to use an alternative option.

New Style

In other news, I've changed the style (again).

Now with stylized sub headers! ^_^

Most of the visual changes came about as I was writing this post and was noticing some oddities with the layout between the 'cheat sheet', mentioned above, and this post... so after looking over the style sheet, I realized I had to make some significant changes to fix that (which, indirectly, led to a new visual design).

The main take away here are the new flex containers, which I'm using now for all content. Originally, I used a half baked form of these for image galleries (it's how I displayed, arranged and added visual design elements to those particular areas).. but when I was trying to make different text sections on the cheat sheet, I needed something similar.. so I tried to use the same system.. but it wasn't playing nice and to make it work would royally mess with existing image galleries.. So it was time to change things up, making a container that was more flexible (thus flex container) so it could be used for multiple situtations.

Removal of list

As I hinted at earlier, I removed the 'list' option from the above navigation menu. This is something that's going to take a bit of time to get working (at least to a level I'm satisfied with), so I decided to just axe the feature for now. I hope to eventually add it back, but the goal is to get more content updates out, which the list feature was slowing me down from doing.