Guess I'm the weirdo. Installed Arch with KDE Plasma, changed the wallpaper, installed Steam, accepted the defaults of everything else. Use it as a daily driver.
Once worked for a software company where we could run Linux on our machines if we maintained them ourselves and wouldn't ask admins for support since they were only supporting the default windows installations. Right before Christmas new coworker joined, early twenties, got into a project that was apparently hard to get it set up locally, we told him get the project running and then spend time to configure your laptop the way you like it to be. Low and behold, he spends Christmas setting up and configuring some fancy desktop environment on Kubuntu, returns to work, shows off the fancy looks and within a week fails to get the project set up and everyone else in the project was using windows. So one week later he was back using windows and super pissed that he wasted like 5 days configuring his desktop. My heart is still bleeding for that poor guy :(
A lot of people did this at that company as well. But mainly my point was that it might be better to first get productive, or verify you can be productive with the OS you installed before you waste tons of hours configuring it in some obscure ways.
Especially since it was usually the ones straight outta university who did the fancy configuration, tons of alias, custom theming and so on stuff while most senior Devs using Linux just used default Ubuntu, Fedora or whatever installations. Something that just worked.
I don't use arch, but this applies to my android habits.
Nova has way too many settings now, though.
I use gestures and look&feel and that's about it.
Custom icons here and there.
Maybe my app drawer has custom folders, colors, tabs.
And maybe my folders use custom gestures, transparency, and colors, and icons.
But that's it.
On Linux I use the fuck out of custom aliases for basic commands like ls or grep or less - mainly for appearance.
This is the most useful alias to me personally: ls='ls -aph --color=always --group-directories-first'
... I've been using nova for like, 14 years. It's not complex. Now if you want a lot of options, FairEmail will overload your brain. Which I also have...
Honestly still using the half finished hyprland build for games, studying, and work. If somethings missing then I fix it or simplify stuff I do all the time otherwise it's largely stock and janky. I'd say it's better than my taskbar freezing in kde or gnome. We don't have to talk about how annoying gnome is to use daily.
Using kde with Nvidia on Wayland. About the only thing I struggled with but it's an incredibly annoying bug kde hasn't fixed in a couple years now.
The gnome team goes above and beyond when it comes to Nvidia support. They were the first to support Wayland on Nvidia and they're one of the first to support explicit sync.
The interface is just annoying to use and work around. Using little hacks and extensions are annoying too, especially when they break.
I use a Dactyl Manuform with Ctrl and Caps Lock switched places; Having Ctrl on the home row has been incredibly comfortable compared to it's usual home
Honestly you should ! Unless you want to do crazy stuff you actually don’t need to learn the entire documentation.
I was able to setup full disk encryption with encrypted boot loader pretty easily, there are great tutorials out there. I’m going to figure out Secure Boot next.
The nice thing is that once you’ve managed to do something, it’s in your config forever. My main problem with Arch was the absence of rollbacks, and having to remember all the stuff you do when installing it that you inevitably forget before the next time your system breaks and needs a reinstall. There’s none of that with Nix, and it’s awesome.
I was able to go zero to Nix in probably 6-10 hours, and could’ve done it sooner if I’d known about this sooner (and I’m not a super technical person).
I'd say it's definitely worth it. I don't actually use nixos itself, but I do use nix a lot. I have everything I need for work in a home manager configuration, so I can literally just install nix and load up my config and have all programs and configuration of said programs installed and ready to go (on any UNIX system). I started doing this since changing jobs means a new machine, and I got really tired of all of the inconsistencies between machines when bringing over my dotfiles, and having to install a bunch of packages I use every time I changed jobs.
I do want to make the switch from Arch to nixos on my personal machine eventually too, but I hardly spend any time on computers outside of work these days, unfortunately. But the great thing is that my home manager configuration can pretty easily slide right into a nixos configuration, which is what many people do.
Nobody said anything about third-party articles. The page linked above is supposed to be a reference, not a tutorial. But the official Nix website also has actual tutorials.
This just makes me want to get into nix even more. Put configs in a git repo and build vms until you have the config you want, then update only when you're doing something new. I use Arch btw. For desktop. Otherwise it's a mix fedora, red hat, debian, Ubuntu, cent, bsd, armbien, openWRT, and a few others.
Now I’m not a shill but I did switch from Arch to Nix (because my Bluetooth was irremediably broken on Arch, and no one responded to any of my posts) and it’s honestly a lot less complicated than the documentation suggests 😆
In Vim’s predecessor, vi, switching modes was easy, with the ESC key located neatly by the Q on the keyboard of the ADM-3A terminal. On modern keyboards, though, it’s a pain ...
A simple trick in vim to alleviate the pain of reaching for the ESC key is using alt + l.
However, this may or may not work depending on the install. I don't remember what exactly this keybind is for but on some systems I've seen it insert a special character. I've found it typically works with vim-enhanced and neovim.
I have switched ESC and Caps Lock for years now. It really makes things so much easier, but now I am the guy in that meme. At least partly: I struggle to find the ESC key on other people's computers, but sadly I'm not 23 anymore.
I think the thing that saves me from doing stuff like this is that as I get older I've begun to hate extraneous cables on and around my desk. For the longest time I've stuck with cabled peripherals, but I think my next buy will be wireless in that department. Now if we could make this foot pedal wireless...
I went the opposite way, got sick of all the wireless stuff disconnecting, battery dying, or not working before the os boots so I switched to wired everything, I went as far as running a usb over ethernet extender to my couch area so I can have a wire keeb and mouse while gaming on the tv
