Unashamed Arch plug

[Ian]

Just had a watch of your video now @Abarbarian and I can see how it works now, but I'm pretty much a full time W10 user (except for mini servers), so xscreensaver is very unfamiliar to me unfortunately. I'm impressed with that simple screen recoding software though, can YouTube handle mkv uploads or did you have to convert it?

 

[Abarbarian]

Just had a watch of your video now @Abarbarian and I can see how it works now, but I'm pretty much a full time W10 user (except for mini servers), so xscreensaver is very unfamiliar to me unfortunately. I'm impressed with that simple screen recoding software though, can YouTube handle mkv uploads or did you have to convert it?

Not sure if YT can handle .mkv. I tried to upload a .mkv version but it seemed to be stuck, however I think that it was just taking a long time to do its thing.
I converted using handbrake to MPEG-4 which gave me a .m4v file and uploaded that. It took quite a long time to upload.

Simplescreenrecorder can record in many different container formats and many different codec formats. I would have recorded in .mp4 but an advisement notice came up "This format will produce unreadable files if the recording is interrupted. Consider using MKV instead" which is what I did.
Trouble is with both simplescreerecorder and handbrake there are so many options and stuff to fiddle with that it is hard for a new user to get a handle on. Finding a clear and easy to use guide is also pretty difficult and you can spend hours on the net trying to find one. It took me some time reading up and setting up to use YT. I would have trimmed the video too but I found that not to be so simple to do on a penguin box, tried out a couple of programs but they just confused me. I recon Windows has easier programs to use for simple video stuff.

That was my first video and I think I will have a read around and try a few things out before I do another one. I fancy doing a series of short videos how to do stuff on good old Window Maker.

 

[Ian]

Ah, that makes sense - handbrake to the rescue!

 

[Abarbarian]

Typically I found several helpfull programs and guides after I had struggled along with my project.

I had tried vidcutter but it would not play my video file, kept saying it was not a valid file. Shame as it looked really easy to use.

VidCutter is an Open-Source Video Trimming App

I found that you could do all sorts of magic stuff with VLC,

How to Trim and Convert Videos in VLC

I will have a serious look in to that later on.

Just for the moment I will use LosslessCut which I have tried out and is darn easy and quick to use.

https://www.techspot.com/downloads/6927-losslesscut.html

LosslessCut is a cross platform GUI tool for lossless trimming / cutting of videos

https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

 

[Ian]

Ohhh, it's cross-platform too. I've been looking for something like Losslesscut for a while, but ended up using Windows Movie Maker to cut videos. Thanks for the heads up on this one .

 

[Abarbarian]

How to Use AUR with Arch Linux

"AUR is actually a repository of PKGBUILD scripts. It doesn’t necessarily hold the source code of the target package. When you’re using AUR, you’re actually grabbing the PKGBUILD script and building the program for yourself.


PKGBUILD a specialized script for the Arch Linux system that tells the compiler how to build a certain package for the system. The process may include downloading an additional package(s) and source code. The script is also free to have specialized tweaks and fixes for the building process.


So, when you’re getting a package from AUR, you’re actually grabbing the PKGBUILD script. Your system still needs to execute the script and perform the building process to completely install the package."

An excellent article very clear and concise . Details installing manually and with a AUR helper.

 

[Abarbarian]

Yes children this is the only operating system you need.

 

[Abarbarian]

There are reasons the Arch wiki exists​

 

[Abarbarian]

 

[Abarbarian]

Archcraft Yet another minimal Linux distribution, based on Arch Linux.

Archcraft is just another Linux distribution, made on top of Arch Linux. It uses window managers and lightweight applications, which makes it super fast. With pre-configured settings, Archcraft provides you the best out of the box window manager experience.

This looked to be a promising Arch based distro sadly there has been no new release since Nov 2021.

They do have a good step by step guide to installing with Calamares and ABIF. The Gallery is worth a look as it has some good screenshots of a variety of Window Managers.

Of interest there included two wayland configured Window Managers. Which may be of more interest to AMD graphic card users than Nvidia users.

Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11. It works with your existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features, plus a few extras.

and

Wayfire is a wayland compositor based on wlroots. It aims to create a customizable, extendable and lightweight environment without sacrificing its appearance.

I rather like the Archcraft Lite versions look.

 

[Abarbarian]

This is not strictly a Arch article but it is very interesting.

The Performance Of Six Linux Distributions On The HP Dev One

The Arch results are a mixed bag. Michael does state that all the os's were installed in a stock standard way. So with a bit of tweaking I guess all the os's would show up differently.


Arch , Clear Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed seemed to come out tops in quite a lot of the runs. So it was a surprise that Arch came out last by quite a way in the overall comparison.

Lastly is a look at the geometric mean of all the benchmarks carried out where they successfully completed on all operating systems under test. Obviously just the raw performance is being looked at and not the power/thermal results here. Pop!_OS 22.04 was right inline with the performance provided by openSUSE, Fedora Workstation, and Ubuntu 22.04 on the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U powered HP Dev One. Arch Linux in its default configuration from Archinstall was noticeably slower than the rest. Intel's Clear Linux meanwhile offered around 13% better performance overall than the other Linux distributions thanks to its aggressive default performance tuning, extra patches, and other optimizations.

As I stated earlier with a tiny bit of tweaking results would be different.