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!
“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.
Whenever I see this spin, I just want to say: “No it wasn’t. It was compiled with Clang.”
Is your gender POSIX-compliant?
No, no - legit! Do go on.
I have my Estrogen tablets sitting on a shelf waiting for me to finish with fertility preservation
Virtual Machines, but I’m too dumb to figure it out.
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.
Have you tried zed? Written in rust, has many extensions. I gave it a try, I quite like it. It’s blazing fast. But I haven’t tried on an old machine.
I haven’t, but I have heard of it. I think parts of Lapce are based on some Zed algorithms.
There a few things I’ve wanted to try for a while, but haven’t gotten around to it.
AstroJS (I’ve tried it, but only half-arsed)… It’s cool, but the lack of native react support scares me…
Cosmic DE… Still waiting for the alpha.
Python. It’s a good language, I’ve spent some time learning it, I’m just failing to find a use case for it atm.
Textual (Python framework). It’s really cool, but OOP scares me.
fish. I think it has most things i want out of the box, so it should be simpler and snappier than my zsh setup. it’s just that zsh hasnt bothered me enough to try it yet.
also nushell, im interested in the idea of manipulating structured data instead of unstructured text
Just take the dive into fish. It used to have a lot of problems with incompatibilities, but that’s been less of a problem lately.
I haven’t found nushell to be that great as a day-to-day shell simply because it integrates poorly with other Linux commands. But when it comes to data manipulation, it is simply amazing. I’m currently (slowly) working on a plugin to query LDAP. The
ldapsearchcommand uses the LDIF format, which is hard to parse reliably. Producing nushell data structures that don’t need fragile parsing would be a boon.
Having my TrueNAS scale homeserver host some pihole, VPN and *arr. I’ve fallen behind the times.
i3w - I want to try it, but thinking, that if I’ll use other programs requiring mouse it will all be for nothing
That’s not true at all. I used to have pain in my wrist and went very heavily into keyboard centric usage. At the time I used AwesomeWM and Conkeror for a full keyboard centric OS, I also learned to touch type in Colemak at this time and bought a trackball. Eventually I started using PyCharm instead of Emacs, and Conkeror was abandoned so I switched back to Firefox, I switched to i3 for their better philosophy on monitors and workspaces, and switched back to a mouse for better aiming on games, and now I have lots of stuff that use mouse, but the pain never came back. And the reason is that while it is true that I still use the mouse, it’s much less than I did before, the vast majority of the time I can be programming, run something in a terminal, go to the browser and do a quick search, send a message to someone on slack and go back to my code without touching the mouse. Sure, if the result of what I was looking for is not on the front page I’ll need the mouse to click a link, and if the person on slack is not the one I was last talking I’ll need the mouse to click his name, but those are two possible mouse movements for a full workflow of stuff that would have needed 6 or more mouse movements before.
what if I’m using dvorak, did you change your configuration for your layout?
I had to write my shortcuts for i3, so I didn’t changed them, I just wrote what made sense, e.g. super+f for full-screen. Most of them are the “default” ones that the example configuration uses, but that’s because they’re sane defaults.
i3, or Sway if you’re on Wayland, just gets out of your way.
Have a virtual desktop for each use case, memorize where your apps are, and enjoy muscle-memory-based window management. Mod4+1 brings me to terminal, 2 is browser, 3 is work stuff, 4 is personal chat, 5 is email… Every app is fullscreen, for maximum screen real estate. Nothing annoys by blinking when I’m trying to concentrate on something else.
oooo. niri is a good one. I’ve had it installed on my fedora system for… Hell I don’t even know how long but I just haven’t been using it. I’ve really been wanting to use NixOS for a while but haven’t had the motivation/determination to sit down and learn it.
Same, niri. Want to move away from hyprland for so long. Also Emacs but I don’t want to spend months configuring.
Also a foss android distro, but I can’t find one for this phone.
there are also lots of other things like common lisp, Redox OS, cosmic desktop, trying to make my own compositor, rope science, activity pub, webtransport, bevy, ecs, and much more.
Edit: Hey, I finally installed niri and everything works!!!
Virtual reality, but an old friend of mine has kindly offered to buy me an Oculus Quest 2 so I’m very much looking forward to what VR can offer.
I highly recommend Pistol Whip!
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?
Btrfs. I’ve been using ext4 for so long, I’m afraid that switching up will just annoy me.
Zsh: same reason.
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!
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.
BtrFS has Stuff.
- Subvolumes, which enable you to share the same /home between Linux distros
- Snapshots that are an great for
- freezing the FS during off-machine backups: create a snapshot, rsync the snapshot not the main FS, drop the snapshot
- transient backups. Will executing this thing hose my system? If no, drop the snapshot.
- ability to pool different disks into a single FS
- and so much more.
Fun story: once I needed to do something (resize? can’t recall) a partition that happened to be in use. The solution involved
smbmounting a network disk,losetuphelping transform that thing into a virtual disk, then migrating the root FS there, recreating partitions, all while running the rootfs on that thing. Thus, pooling can bu useful.By the way, what does Zsh have over bash that you find useful?
zsh has vi mode
Not OP , but regarding zsh, it has much better auto completion, and suggestion support. Additionally you can theme your prompt much more, see for example powerlevel10k
Honestly, the only btrfs feature that interests me is the snapshotting, as the current state of my backups is rather sub-par. There’s just a lot of inertia involved in adopting it when ext4 Just Works™. Maybe next time I install a new system I’ll give it a shot.
As for zsh, I rather like the general “intelligence” I see on others’ machines: the way it autocorrects typos, draws a navigable menu for tab completions complete with colour highlighting… it looks lovely. I’ve been a Bash user for 25 years though, and muscle memory like smashing the tab key to get what I want is a hard habit to break.
FOSS remote camera control and fine art printing software is top of my agenda currently. Got a few avenues of enquiry but any recommendations would be welcomed, particularly on the printing side. I’d also like to become expert at using my current programs, especially GIMP and Ardour, for my own use but also so I can teach others.
LLM speech-to-text.
It appears continuous speech recognition is possible, but I only got as far as recognition of an audio file.
Still very cool!
Grab the Live Captions flatpak
Thanks! While flatpaks are not the Gentoo way, I’ll give it a try.
