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.
docker I guess, I still don’t know how it works, create them, etc
You don’t have to know how it works in order to use it. I don’t know either but I could host services using docker. trust me it’s way easier than it seems.
Same here. Even easier if you use an app to manage it for you like dockge, portainer, Cosmos, etc.
You don’t have to… if the project you want to use has a good setup process. Otherwise you’ll be scouring Docker docs, GitHub issues, and StackOverflow for years.
I’ve been using linux on and off for 20 years and docker reignited my interest for running linux. There’s plenty of good guides and free courses, if you need help finding one - let me know and I’ll send you a YT playlist.
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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
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.
If you aren’t already, you could get familiar with the vim motions within VSCode via a plugin. Moving over to a vim setup can be overwhelming, setting up your lsp,linters, other packages. Adding on the need to still learn key bindings makes it extra difficult. I started with VSCode using vim motions, went to doom emacs and used evil mode and then my mentor got me hooked on vim. Do it in steps and you’ll get to a config that lets you code without much fussing, good luck!
Oh, yeah, vim motions are wonderful. I started using them when I installed Linux on my Chromebook due to the lack of a good keyboard setup (I still don’t know where the Delete key is on that thing).
I just moved from Neovim to Helix. I think it’s worth considering, especially if you don’t know the keybindings yet. Plus, Helix is probably easier to learn.
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.
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.
Zed - I’ve been kind of using it for one-off edits, but it’s just not mature yet for most languages.
Python. Been wanting to learn it for years but all mental capacity I have toward such stuff is drained by work. The whole situation is ironic.
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!
Anything beyond setting up a network-wide dns blocker on docker, so… crowdsec, fail2ban, some proxy-related stuff, zero trust tunnelers and so on.
Why? Because its overkill to my current setup and I don’t see myself using em for real other than for learning purposes, and thats it.
And before someone asks “Do you protect your server at all?”. Other than making some “hacky” stuff with my internet so all ports appear as closed whilst they actually aren’t? Eh, not really. Still, my server is about to reach a year of running nonstop 24/7 and it has never been hacked a single time since then, so naaaw.
Immich
Wanting to spin-up but constantly delaying…
Btrfs. I’ve been using ext4 for so long, I’m afraid that switching up will just annoy me.
Zsh: same reason.
There are a lot of “I like this in theory but nobody else I know uses it” social things like Matrix 😑
Ceph. I have some Raspberry Pi’s that I’m going to set up a cluster with. Just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I half expect the performance to be relatively terrible, but maybe it won’t and I can try to build something on top of the cluster in a sort of hyper converged setup.
It’s completely overkill for a small home lab but that’s what makes it fun.
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.
The first thing that came to mind when I saw the question is perhaps a bit of a weird answer–but I really want to learn SELinux. It’s completely overkill for my Linux desktop and the few services I run on my network. The same with OpenLDAP, I want to play around with it even though I have no real need for it with my setup, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
On that note, I also feel like I want to learn Ansible, or some other configuration management tool. The thing is, I haven’t even played around with it (or any others) enough to really even get what the intended use case is. I’m looking for ways to manage policies and configurations across multiple machines in a common way, but it feels like the more common use case is deploying webapps. So while it’s on my list of things I want to learn I don’t even have sufficient background at the moment.
Then, finally, the other thing that came to mind was timeshift–or really BTRFS snapshots in general. It would be nice to have that additional feeling of safety while playing around with my systems.
