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This is mostly for my reference if I need it. Some of it may be useful to others.

Fonts

Fonts should be readable with characters that are easy to distinguish from each other even with poor vision. Most fonts fail at this, even if they're mostly readable. Atkinson Hyperlegible does a great job and is my gold standard for comparison, hence my userscript to change web pages to it. On desktop you can turn off the ability for pages to set their fonts, but for some sites like font sites, you don't want that, and mobile lacks that feature.
For mono, the best fonts I've found which don't fail at this are Fira Code, Source Code Pro (mostly), or Hasklug. Fira Code is a bit better designed than Source Code Pro, but has ligatures which is unacceptable sometimes, and SCP is more widely and easily available. Check these characters in your font:

  • q9gB80OoailI1LCGQ{}
  • q9gB80OoailI1LCGQ{}

Noto did a good thing trying to eliminate tofu, but AH did a better thing making a readable font. To combine those things you can use Atkinson Hyperlegible Pro. To install on Linux, you can put fonts in ~/.local/share/fonts. For Windows you just open the font files. For the other fonts I recommend the nerd font versions of Fira Code mono and Source Code Pro. The regular versions are likely in your repos. On Windows you can use scoop install firacode or choco install firacode atkinson-hyperlegible. There's no scoop package for AH yet so you'll have to download it yourself (though I recommend the pro version above).

Here are examples of common fonts which suck at this, plus AH & FC for comparison:

  • Arial:

    Arial sucks

  • Consolas:

    Consolas sucks

  • DejaVu Sans:

    DejaVu Sans sucks

  • Noto Sans:

    Noto Sans sucks

  • Segoe UI:

    Segoe UI sucks

  • Source Code Pro is decent:

    Source Code Pro is decent

  • Tahoma:

    Tahoma sucks

  • Verdana:

    Verdana sucks

  • Monoid's design is great, but it's too tall (like double the height of AH):

    Monoid is great, but too tall

  • Fira Code is great:

    Fira Code is great

  • Atkinson Hyperlegible is great:

    Atkinson Hyperlegible is great

Clock applet format

Date format:

%H:%M %p%n%a. %b. %e

Tooltip:

%I:%M %p%n%Y-%m-%d

Syntax reference.

Default web browser for xdg-open

xdg-settings set default-web-browser firefox.desktop

Keyboard

Enable Magic sysrq keys:

  • To use these, they must first be activated with either sysctl kernel.sysrq=1 or echo "1" > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq. If you wish to have it enabled during boot, edit /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf and insert the text kernel.sysrq = 1. If you want to make sure it will be enabled even before the partitions are mounted and in the initrd, then add sysrq_always_enabled=1 to your kernel parameters.

Swap caps & esc

I recommend swapping caps & esc. esc is much more useful for most people than caps, which is rarely used, so it makes sense to swap them. If this isn't true for you, then this doesn't apply for you. Some do similar things like turning caps into another ctrl, but that makes little sense when there's already a ctrl right there, two keys away, which you can hit with the side of your hand, or pinky if you're reaching.

I used to use this, which only applies to X and not in virtual terminals (eg. ctrl+alt+f2). Resume from suspend also reverts it for me.

setxkbmap -option "caps:swapescape"

If you don't mind it only working in the GUI and use Cinnamon, you can just change it in the keyboard layout options, at the bottom of the options for caps.
If you want to keep it permanent and consistent everywhere so you don't get thrown if you end up in a VT after getting used to it, use udev to swap keys in the kernel. For my keyboard I put the following in /usr/lib/udev/hwdb.d/70-keyboard.hwdb:

# Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000

evdev:input:b0003v045Ep00DB*
 KEYBOARD_KEY_70039=esc                                 # caps > esc
 KEYBOARD_KEY_70029=capslock                            # esc > caps
 KEYBOARD_KEY_c022d=up                                  # zoomin
 KEYBOARD_KEY_c022e=down                                # zoomout

Then run:

sudo systemd-hwdb update
sudo udevadm trigger

For more info on remapping keys on Linux, and how to determine the config for your keyboard, see:

Mount virtualbox shared folder in Linux

sudo mount -t vboxsf vbox-shared /mnt/vbox-shared

Enable VTs

Edit /etc/systemd/logind.conf to have NAutoVTs=4. Should take effect immediately.

Package management/building

Automatically clean the package cache.

sudoedit /usr/share/libalpm/hooks/pacman_cache.hook

Contents:

[Trigger]
Operation = Upgrade
Operation = Install
Operation = Remove
Type = Package
Target = *

[Action]
Description = Cleaning pacman cache...
When = PostTransaction
Exec = /usr/bin/paccache -rk2

Check for firmware updates.

sudoedit /etc/pacman.d/hooks/fwupd.hook

Contents:

[Trigger]
Operation = Install
Operation = Upgrade
Type = Package
Target = *

[Action]
Depends = fwupd
When = PostTransaction
Exec = /usr/bin/fwupdmgr get-updates
Description = Checking for firmware updates...

Manjaro driver installation

Find classid, then use it to install:

mhwd --pci -l -d | grep 'INFO\|CLASS'
sudo mhwd -a pci nonfree <classid>

QT & GTK

Install qt5-styleplugins and qt5ct. Restart, run qt5ct from terminal and select gtk2. For gtk2 apps install gtk-theme-switch2 and select theme.

Bootable USB w/various ISOs

This section is outdated. Use Ventoy now.

  1. Install syslinux:

    sudo pacman -S syslinux

    or

    sudo apt-get install syslinux

  2. Repartition and format USB as FAT.

  3. Mark as bootable. Use gparted. Set label.

  4. Copy syslinux master boot record to drive:

    sudo dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdg

  5. Install syslinux on the drive partition:

    sudo syslinux /dev/sdg1

  6. Mount the drive. Use file manager or,

    sudo mount /dev/sdg1 /media/temp

  7. Copy the memdisk bootloader to drive:

    sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /media/temp

  8. Copy the .iso to drive.

  9. Create file named syslinux.cfg on drive with the following, using correct iso name:

DEFAULT labelname
LABEL labelname
  LINUX memdisk
  INITRD filename.iso
  APPEND iso
  1. Done! Boot with it.
  2. Troubleshoot

Blocking net in Wine

  1. wine regedit
  2. Go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
  3. You should see a ProxyEnable key that is set to 0. Set it to 1.
  4. Create the following DWORD values (right-click and select new): "MigrateProxy" set to "ProxyHttp.1.1" set to 0
  5. Create the following Strings: "ProxyOverride" set to "" "ProxyServer" set to "http://prohibited:80" "UserAgent" set to "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Win32)"