Past me was a lazy bum

I have been primarily using my windows 10 partition on my computer. This is because

1. Some tools I use for a MMO only work on Windows
2. Some games I play with friends will randomly crash when I am on my Linux partition
3. Screen sharing via discord on Wayland was broken up until recently, which made running D&D games near impossible

One of the things I wound up doing on my Linux partition was to leverage the My Linux 4 Work dotfiles, which automated a lot of the initial setup for Hyprland when it was still "newer" and trickier to get up and running.

This was great at first - get the dotfiles, run the script to create the necessary symlinks, reboot, and everything would be at least 97% working. I had some issues due to having a Nvidia graphics card and for some reason my mouse would never work on an update, but I knew the file to edit to get everything up and running.

As time has gone on, the dotfiles provided have grown and there is a lot in there that is not useful for me. I don't really need or want a calendar and calculator as widgets, I don't need dynamic inverse color themes... It is great that he has been able to expand and grow this tool, and that people are enjoying it, but it is starting to get to a point where I feel it is a bit bloated and I want to slim it down.

I recently heard that the Wayland issues for Discord were resolved, so I booted back into my linux partition to see how things were doing. Not only did I have ~640 updates needed, but there were some things that were breaking - I couldn't load wallpapers, it would only show a black screen. The waypaper command was failing and even though I had the necessary python modules installed they weren't being found. A lot of the bells and whistles that came with the dotfiles were unstable on my machine and would crash, resulting in needing to reboot to get back to a state where things were usable.

I realized I didn't have a great idea on where to even start fixing things, since I didn't really put it together. It was someone else's work, and I was just using it and now having to maintain it without having a good understanding for how or why the pieces and parts were chosen. Why did I have both swww and hyprpaper installed when they are both similar tools? Why are scripts firing some times and not others?

Because I chose the quick and easy way out, I traded convenience for a future headache that I am now dealing with. I will most likely boot into Cinnamon, nuke everything related to those dotfiles and hyprland, and start from scratch to get something up and running so I can at least have an understanding of what to do when something breaks.

And really... that's why most people run Linux anyway right? Because the tinkering is more fun than anything else.