My standard configuration

I use Arch GNU/Linux. I know how to use it very well, and I love it dearly.
One of the amazing things about Arch is that you get to build your system from the ground up (but without waiting for things to compile). Therefore, the system that I run is exactly what I want. It has no defaults; I've carefully chosen everything and I've put together configurations and scripts to work with the exact environment that I prefer. My system is truly mine, and you would only get that on a do-it-yourself distribution like Arch.
It's occured to me that I've never actually bothered to write down what, exactly, my preferred environment is. This would be useful for two reasons:

• Other people may be interested
• There are too many things that I configure, and I can't actually remember them when I go to install a new system. Therefore, there are a bunch of inconsistencies between my systems that really just shouldn't be there (and that annoy me when I run into them).

So, I have decided to publish a list of my standard setup. Here goes:
The standalone programs that I use regularly and always have installed are git, the Z Shell, Emacs (along with emacs-pkgbuild-mode), Firefox (along with all the GStreamer 0.10 plugins that it can use, and an English language pack), OpenSSH, sudo, pacmatic (with html2text), and Aura. I also always have Steam, Terminator, Pidgin, LibreOffice (Writer, Draw, Impress, the English language pack and the GNOME integration) and Nuvola Player. For that last one, I turn on the Dock Manager, Last.fm/Libre.fm, Lyrics Fetching, Media Keys, Notifications, Tray Icon, and Remote Player Interface (MPRIS) extensions. I also keep base-devel installed.
Utilities that I have installed but only use semi-regularly include strace, the Lynx web browser, rsync, cowsay, traceroute, nmap (with PyGTK for Zenmap), GNOME Tweak Tool, GNUCash, abs and pkgfile. I also install btrfs-progs (because I prefer btrfs for everything but /boot - that gets the ext4 treatment), and parted. I have Deja Dup, Bitcoin Core (aka bitcoin-qt), Brasero, devhelp (from GNOME), File Roller (from GNOME), Four-in-a-Row (also from GNOME), GNOME Software (GNOME's PackageKit frontend), GNOME Activity Journal (frontend to Zeitgeist), Anjuta (the GNOME development environment), Cheese, GNOME Chess, GNOME Clocks, GNOME Documents, GNOME Disk Utility, GNOME Mines, GNOME Music, GNOME Nettool, GNOME Nibbles, GNOME Robots, Quadrapassel (basically GNOME Tetris), GNOME Weather, and last but not least from the GNOME department, Seahorse. I also have the Android SDK installed from the AUR, and finally, while it's not strictly a utility, I should mention that I have pkgstats installed, to help out with Arch development.
I also have a small amount of extra documentation and other static files installed - namely, gnome-devel-docs, an offline copy of the Arch Wiki and the archlinux-wallpaper package.
If given the choice, I install using a GPT partition header. As stated above, I create a /boot partition formatted ext4, usually 256MB. I always create a swap partition - this is generally about 2GB, but it varies by installation. I create a /home partition, formatted btrfs inside a LUKS container, that's usually around 30GB - although I am looking to change this number, due to needing to store the Bitcoin block chain (and wanting room for some VMs). The rest of the hard drive, I generally fill with /. (I'm thinking about making / a fixed amount, and filling the rest of the drive with /home. But I'm not sure yet.) For the kernel, I use the stock Arch kernel but I keep the linux-lts package installed, just in case an upgrade to the regular kernel breaks. I have an extremely standard mkinitcpio.conf: the only differences to really note are that I have the encrypt hook added, and the keyboard hook earlier. For a bootloader, I use GRUB 2. I use the standard configuration except for the fact that I turn on the blue colors in /etc/default/grub.
All right, so we've covered filesystems. We've covered applications. Time to tackle the elephant in the room: desktop environment. I use the GNOME Shell as my desktop environment, so I have all of GNOME core installed (but I hand-pick extra applications, as you've probably guessed by the massive list of GNOME applications above). The extensions I have installed vary a bit, but I always have Dash to Dock (set to have autohide/intellihide on, set to switch workspaces when scrolling over any region of the dock, set to have an opacity of 50 and set to launch a new window when clicking on an icon), Caffeine, Drop Down Terminal (configured to use F1, so that I can use it with my Happy Hacking Keyboard), Messaging Menu, (with microblog statuses turned on), Media Player Indicator (integrated with the volume menu), Advanced Volume Mixer (set to "aggregated menu") and Topicons. I also always have Systemmonitor, Places Status Indicator, Removable Drive Menu, and User Themes - all of these come bundled with GNOME - turned on. Additionally, I have a couple extra backends installed: I have the libpurple backend for Telepathy installed, and I have GVFS backends for SMB, AFP, MTP and most importantly, a backend for GNOME Online Accounts. I also have a couple things installed to make stuff in GNOME Control Center work: Rygel, gnome-user-share, system-config-printer, vino, and (as I'll mention later) ntpd.
Because I use GNOME as my desktop environment, I always have the NetworkManager systemd service enabled - however, I make an important addition: I add nohook resolv.conf to /etc/dhcpcd.conf so that I can apply custom DNS settings without the DHCP daemon overwriting them. I then use this ability to set my /etc/resolv.conf to use DNS servers from the OpenNIC project. Actually, turns out you can do this simply by creating /etc/resolv.conf.head - this file will be prepended to the final /etc/resolv.conf, which has the advantage of automatically falling back on the DHCP-configured DNS if OpenNIC DNS fails for some reason. I also have ntpd, Avahi, and GDM enabled. I also have the server component of OpenSSH turned on - the only configuration change I make is to disable root access, as the default configuration is actually pretty secure. Finally, in the GNOME Control Center, I've turned on screen sharing (password-protected). I really should configure printing, but honestly, I can't be bothered.
As a final miscellaneous note, I configure DNSSEC validation everywhere I can. There are a couple key differences between some of my machines that I haven't covered here, but those are all due to machine-specific needs (e.g. one of my machines - my iMac - has a Bluetooth mouse, so I have the Bluez utilities installed). But those are boring to write about, so I'm not going to write about them.
I'm also planning to add ZeroTier One to my default configuration. However, I haven't gotten it to work quite right yet, so that'll have to wait until later.
That's all I can think of for now (except my shell, of course, but the configurations for that are already public). I'll be posting new blog posts when I make configuration changes from now on, so you'll hear about this again... sometime.

I [redacted] hate Apple

If you know me in real life, you know that it's no secret that I am not a fan of Apple's mobile products. They are disgusting:

• They won't let you install apps not from the App Store without jailbreaking the device, and the criteria for getting apps into the App Store is not well-defined and rather arbitrary
• They won't let you experiment with custom firmware
• They push DRM
• They're relatively tied to iTunes (which doesn't work on GNU/Linux)
• You can't do anything real with them due to the highly restrictive security model (and the fact that guidelines for getting into the App Store are draconian)
• They don't have an equivalent of Android Intents (so you can't e.g. change the default browser from Safari)

Those last two are obviously just my personal taste talking. However, the rest still stands. I hate Apple mobile products, and I would never buy one these days.
That all being said, I used to say that Apple computers aren't really all that bad. Yes, they do have problems:

• OS X is the buggiest Unix on the block (see also)
• Even though Darwin is open-source, the vast majority of Apple's desktop stack is closed-source (to name just one example: Quartz, the display server, is closed-source).
• It's impossible to properly customize them (this is in large part due to the fact that the stack is closed, but Apple at its core doesn't really like users to customize all that much, IMHO).

 Those days are done. I can now say with certainty that I hate Apple computers, too. The first reason is obvious: the OS is annoying; I've just covered this above. However, it's not annoying enough that I can't use it on a daily basis (like Windows is). If I wasn't using GNU/Linux and didn't want to try a BSD, I'd be using OS X. It's has problems, but overall, it's a pretty dang good operating system. So let's talk about all the other reasons I now hate Apple computing products.

The wireless
I can't tell you why. I bet no one but Apple could tell you why. But it seems like every bloody Mac has a Broadcom chip. And, well, Broadcom is not known for excellent GNU/Linux support. It could be worse, but the Broadcom drivers are of the class of drivers that require firmware to operate. I dislike firmware in general, because it's non-free and I don't trust anything but free software, but to make matters even worse, Broadcom's licensing terms disallows redistributing their firmware. That means that on most Macs, in order to get on the internet using something other than OS X, you need to get on the internet. Think about that for a minute. Sucks, right?
I'm lucky enough to own a MacBook Pro that has a built-in ethernet port. People who have bought newer MacBook Pros don't have this luxury. In fact, probably the only way that I can think of to get an internet connection for these poor souls (besides screwing around with USB tethering or something) is to mount a live ISO, find the firmware directory (which may be quite hard depending on how the ISO is built, ahem Ubuntu), and put the Broadcom firmware in their. It's a nightmare.

The EFI firmware
Now, EFI in general is kind of weird. To name just one example, EFI drivers often remain loaded after the kernel is booted. And while Secure Boot is undoubtedly a good thing in the right circumstances, Restricted Boot is not. But overall, I don't have a problem with EFI or UEFI (EFI 2.0, the version that's widely deployed). I do have a problem with Apple's EFI, though. Here;'s the reason:
It is screwed up in every imaginable way.
Let's start with the basics: what it's supposed to be. The answer? No one knows. Apple's EFI is a weird mix between EFI and UEFI; it is both and neither at the same time. Well, that's a great start.
The second thing that annoys me about Apple EFI is the fact that it has no EFI shell. Now, obviously shells are kind of ugly, and Apple (being Apple) needs to make its firmware pretty. I have no problem with this, but it would have been nice if they could have included a shell behind a keyboard shortcut or something. But no, you won't find a EFI shell in Macs. Now that I think about it, it's probably for the better. The Frankenstein-esque mess that you'd find there, given the mix of EFI and UEFI, would probably be horrifying.
And that brings us neatly to the last part of the mess that is EFI on Macs: bless. How can I phrase this? What the hell, Apple. I can't even fathom what moon-man black magic bless does. Basically, you have to mount your EFI partition, then use bless to "bless" a file, a directory, a mountpoint (probably your EFI partition) or... something else. But I have no idea which one of these you do. I've done it a couple times, and it's awful. There's absolutely no documentation on exactly how the options affect the firmware. The manpage is lacking. It's dismal, because without properly "blessing" your chosen bootloader, the firmware won't boot it. It's so weird, I can't even fathom how it's supposed to work.


The graphics configuration
This one, I suppose, is not really Apple's fault. But it's still bloody annoying. Basically, Macs nowadays have two GPUs: one is an integrated Intel (which sucks, because it is Intel and it is integrated) and the other is a discrete AMD (which is relatively good, because it's AMD and it's descrete). The way that OS X handles this is to use the Intel GPU normally, but turn on the AMD GPU if you're using something like OpenGL or OpenCL. Clever, right?
Well, the GNU/Linux community hasn't quite caught up. Support for hybrid graphics, as this setup is called, is still early. And on an unrelated note, when I booted my brand-new Arch setup on my MacBook, the kernel hung due to KMS not working properly. And because I have to turn off KMS to boot, I can't get graphics. I've wasted about 8 hours trying to get this to work. It's a bloody nightmare.

The touchpad
This one I will again admit is not really Apple's fault. Only a little.
I'll keep this section short, but basically, the trackpads in Mac computers are (presumably) very complex in order to support the kinds of things that Apple does with them in OS X-land (think: natural scrolling, multitouch gestures, right-click can be either left-click or right-click, there isn't really a clear separation between left and right-click - it feels as though the trackpad is physically all one button - etc.). This unfortunately means that there really isn't a good trackpad driver for Macs. Back when I was using Debian, I came across a decent one, but even that one was sub-par - I never got right-click to work. It was a real problem, trust me.

AGH, I HATE APPLE! Anyway...