For me, I really want to get into niri, but the lack of XWayland support scares me (I know there’s solutions, but I don’t understand them yet).
Also, I stopped using Emacs (even though I love its design and philosophy with my whole heart) because it’s very slow, even as a daemon.
Estroge- oh, I’m in the Linux community whoops
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Estrogen, is in fact, GNU/Estrogen, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Estrogen. Estrogen is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Estrogen, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Estrogen, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Estrogen is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Estrogen is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Estrogen added, or GNU/Estrogen. All the so-called Estrogen distributions are really distributions of GNU/Estrogen!
Is your gender POSIX-compliant?
“I use Estrogen as my operating system,” I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. “Actually”, he says with a grin, "Estrogen is just the kernel. You use GNU+Estrogen!’ I don’t miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn’t include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. It’s Estrogen, but it’s not GNU+Estrogen.
The smile quickly drops from the man’s face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams “I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT’S STILL GNU!” Coolly, I reply “If Testosterone was compiled With gcc, would that make it GNU?” I interrupt his response with “-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even you were correct, you wont be for long.”
With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man’s life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I’ve womansplained him to death.
No, no - legit! Do go on.
I have my Estrogen tablets sitting on a shelf waiting for me to finish with fertility preservation
NixOS
I just started yesterday in a VM. It’s no stress and you can easily put your configuration on metal after. Pretty fun stuff.
The most satisfying part of the NixOS process is deploying to bare metal and watching it work exactly as you intend it to
I have my garuda installation just where and how i want it to be. NixOS just always seemed very interesting, but i don’t want to run it on my daily machine.
Agreed, but I found getting NixOS the way I want it, to be super overwhelming, and documentation simply sucks. I’ve been thinking of forking ZaneyOS (Link: https://gitlab.com/Zaney/zaneyos) and basing my NixOS config on it. Otherwise, it’s just too much.
My drive to nix was so I could simply manage what packages I had installed with a text file. If I removed something from the file, I expect it to be uninstalled. I never found a tool/wrapper for apt to do this.
If you want to start with nixos, I would take whatever distro you are on and install nix and then home manager. Then, you can slowly migrate your user configuration over without starting from scratch. That worked really well for me going from ubuntu to nixos.
Neovim. I tried to use it a year ago, but I felt like I was fighting it every time I just wanted to make progress on my project. VSCode doesn’t get in my way. I’m going to give it another shot in a few years.
Haven’t used neovim, but I had to try vim way too many times. I can’t use anything else now.
vim (or better yet vim bindings) is great. I’ll never go back.
Try kickstart.nvim. I was skeptical until I tried it. It’s a very good starting point for Neovim. Pretty much eberything else I’ve ever tried is either too bloated, too complicated, too outdated, too overwhelming, or a mix of the above. Link: https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim
I want to use Neovim but I haven’t gotten around to really learning it yet.
I used neovim but recently switched to helix and highly recommend it. If you haven’t tried nvim yet, give helix a try before deciding. A good way to compare is do the tutorial of each and see which you like more
nvim +Tutorandhx --tutor(orhelix --tutor).If you’re a current vim user the helix keybindings are only a small learning curve after the tutorial, and feel a lot smoother imo
I love Helix. I like that it pretty much works out of the box and the only thing you have to do is install language servers and in some cases configure them, but that’s (mostly) well documented. No need to install plugins or use a preset “distribution” like with NeoVim. I also like the built-in keyboard shortcut hints, for example when you press g (goto) it shows you what key will do what.
The way Helix does “select first, then act” is subjective, but I like it.
Agree on all counts. I didn’t like finding and comparing plugins for neovim, and then wrestling with environment stuff to get them to work, and having to change a bunch of options to get nvim to work how I want. With helix, my config of things I’ve changed from default is very small, and there’s no wrestling with plugins.
And yeah, “select then act” feels a lot smoother and more intuitive to me. If you like that and like plugins tho, check out kakuone
I’ve used helix for a few months and liked a few default keybindings. Didn’t like the reversed sequences (movement then action) so switched back to neovim and configured helix like bindings for some actions.
I tried out Helix, but I think the biggest issue that I have is that with (neo)vim, I can use the keybindings in most of the editors I use through a plugin (such as IdeaVim for the JetBrains suite) - but I do not think the concept of Helix keybinding plugins have really hit anywhere.
Helix itself seemed really cool when I was playing around with the tutor mode though.
Yeah I only really use it for personal stuff for that reason. There’s a vscode plugin, but last time I tried it it was really slow
Could you elaborate on what helix is?
A keyboard and terminal based text editor, similar in some ways to neovim, vim, and vi
That’s me as well, I’ve used vim for simple edits over the years but more and more just used nano for most of my terminal based edits. Finally ran vimtutor (mainly because I wasn’t aware of it) and wow, I should have done that years ago.
Lapce, an IDE written in Rust. It’s nice and light compared to most IDE’s, so I use it a bit on my aging laptop from 2015. However, it doesn’t have the extension ecosystem or polish of my favored IDE, VS Code.
Niri looks really cool. I’ve used tiling WM before but scrolling is a unique take, perhaps more productive for some folks?
Nushell is a good one. I do data science for a living and it’d be nice to have the shell handle some small data transformations instead of writing a script in python. But all the syntax and behavior is very different than bash, so I’ve been afraid to start because of the learning curve.
Wayland, but I’m patiently waiting for xfce to support it
A fine day that will be!
Wayland here as well, but I don’t see compositors having xmonad functionality that I need
I kind of want to try wayland just to be modern, but I’m pretty happy with xmonad and don’t want to learn another window manager.
You might want to look into River, a tiling Wayland compositor inspired by xmonad. Disclaimer, I’ve not actually used xmonad before so I’m not in a position to compare the two. But River is configured entirely through riverctl commands. Its “config” is an executable, by default at
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/river/initbut you can point it to a different path, which can technically be any executable file that just executes when River starts. Ordinarily it’d be a shell script calling all the riverctl commands you want to get your River set up the way you like it, but it could be any executable you like really. You can also use other languages other than shell scripting.It’s still in pretty early development, but I daily drive it for my main general-purpose machine and it works completely fine. I use it for web browsing, coding, gaming, chatting, general productivity, etc, all works. I’ve noticed some minor hiccups but nothing breaking or unusable. Tbh I would say it’s more stable than Hyprland which I’ve also used and have noticed that Hyprland updates (especially from git) would frequently break it, whereas I was running River compiled from the latest commit of master branch for a while and never had an update break things.
Elixir, or Gleam/pure Erlang/some other Erlang VM language. I think Erlang is extremely cool and I’ve enjoyed the little time I spent with Elixir. I also have absolutely no use case to make proper use of it.
Btrfs. I’ve been using ext4 for so long, I’m afraid that switching up will just annoy me.
Zsh: same reason.
Perhaps you are a more discerning filesystem user than I am, but I don’t think I’ve actually noticed any difference on btrfs except that I can use snapshots and deduplication.
Zsh
FWIW, the excellent ZSH Quickstart kit has been splendid for my transition.
Actually, tutorials like that are a big reason that I don’t want to switch. The first steps are things like:
- Install these fonts that only work in a GUI environment
- Install these programs straight from GitHub without your package manager
…and all I hear is: “this stuff isn’t ready yet” and “I’m going to be staring at Unicode glyphs the next time I have to tinker outside of my GUI”.
If I can’t easily and securely install a shell on every environment I use as I don’t want to be constantly context switching, then I’m going to have to stick to Bash.
…and all I hear is: “this stuff isn’t ready yet” and “I’m going to be starring at Unicode glyphs the next time I have to tinker outside of my GUI”.
This really isn’t a zsh problem, but a “people putting too much stuff in a ‘getting started’ config”.
I used zsh for 15 years before looking at any plug-in manager, you can get a lot of the good stuff like the completion by just going through the first-run wizard included in zsh. A lot of stuff is included directly with zsh, including various prompt themes (which is what that tutorial wants extra fonts for, because they use a fancy prompt with custom glyphs; I don’t think any of the built-in ones need that)
Things like fuzzy history search with fzf is usually included with fzf’s distro package and the additional zsh-completions package for less used or newer commands is also packaged by most distros. In my experience, a lot of the other plugins are stuff that could be a standalone script instead of a plug-in anyway.
Well that’s much more encouraging. I may just give it a try if the first run wizard is simple enough. Thanks!
any distro other than ubuntu but i’m lazy after ive been doing that shit all day at work
For what its worth, I know that while a lot of the hardcore Linux community seems to absolutely despise Ubuntu/Canonical because of snaps and whatnot, I don’t think there is anything actually wrong with using Ubuntu if that is what works for you. Use the best tool for the job!
ive been feeling stability issues with it on the last cycles, pretty gnarly issue on gnome and they still havent pushed the point release that fixes it, been wanting a change but i need the machine for work, so i dont want to fuck around with it.
Ah, gotcha. May there be more stability in your future soon!
Hey hold on, I also hate Ubuntu because of how awful gnome is. Can’t blame everything on snap!
touche. i like gnome a lot, but i wanted to try plasma 6 on another distro
Been rocking Manjaro with Gnome for a long time, but then Plasma 6 came out, I switched over and couldn’t be happier.
Fair enough!
I’ve always wanted to contribute to an open source project but by the time I get done with the grind of the work day I don’t have the mental energy to effectively work a second job competently.
A billion dollars?
Do people even wish for a million dollars anymore? Shit doesn’t even buy a home in most cities.
It’s a wish, why would I settle?
I think a lot of the recent AI tools could be fun as toys to play around with, but I’m just very uncomfortable using tech that exploits everyone who doesn’t own a huge megacorp.
Also, emacs as a replacement for my graphical editor. It feels like there isn’t a “neovim” style modern version, and there’s a steep learning curve to configuring it.
Also, Wayland. Come on, Cinnamon. ;_;
If you want something similar to vim or neovim, but without all the fuss learning how to configure it and install plugins and such, you could try helix.
There are several things I was doing in X-Org that I really don’t have the capacity to figure out in Wayland. One of them was customizing touch pad shortcuts, I used to like having 3 figure swipe commands that worked like keyboard shortcuts. The other was my KVM programs like Barrier seems unable to work in Wayland.
I hope for simple solutions to these problems in the future.
I think the new Wayland fork will fix that
I want to use COSMIC but its design sucks, I prefer KDE (and on the Rust side: slint).
I want to use GNOME as what it does works great, but it lacks a whole list of features I use.
I want to use Haruna or many other KDE apps, but GNOME/GTK apps are often better and I dont care.
I want to use Gapless as it is the only music player on Linux that seems to not suck? But it lacks many features.
Does COSMIC’s design suck or is it in pre-alpha?
No that is the design they want. If something is ready, then their design.
Its design sucks
Agreed. But I’m SO tired of trying to find and configure a good tiling WM that has rounded corners and isn’t impossible to install or created by assholes (it also helps that nice QoL features like easy kb layout switching are included ootb).
Qtile, when scenefx support happens (which will happen when scenefx releases v1.0 aka anytime between this year and the next decade by the looks of things), will be perfect for me but until then, I’m torn between Qtile, Hyprland and COSMIC.
As far as rounded corners and easy to use, I’ve had a tremendous time with swayfx for the past few months, which I switched to from Hyprland.
If only it supported dynamic tiling… (and no, autotiling doesn’t cut it; Actually, I need to look into persway again and see if that can work)