12 ms·

I used to spend hours on getting things like window managers, X11, etc. set up just the way I wanted them to be. However, the older I get the less enthused I a

by nilsb 6y ago

I used to spend hours on getting things like window managers, X11, etc. set up just the way I wanted them to be. However, the older I get the less enthused I am about having to play around with config files to get basic features like suspend/resume to work on my daily work notebook.

perfmode 6y ago
I am solemnly transitioning from neovim to JetBrains for this reason. Feels weird to be on a subscription model for my fundamental text editing needs. Life on the teat.
- nullserver 6y ago
  I miss when vim was my full IDE. But on a large project, I could not it keep it from thrashing the system while indexing.
  - hpoe 6y ago
    I'd plug Doom Emacs my friend, all the power of a full IDE with all the keybindings of Vim.
    - patrec 6y ago
      If you think Doom Emacs has all the power of a full IDE, you have no clue about IDEs.
      - jhardy54 6y ago
        Instead of being rude and snarky, maybe you could highlight some IDE-only features that you find compelling?
      - vulcan01 6y ago
        Have you tried setting up LSC on either vim or emacs? It does everything an IDE does, aside from a debugger. Compile time errors are highlighted as soon as you're done typing, and many other IDE-like features.
        cgh 6y ago
        LSC is just a language server plugin, right? That's not even close to covering what an ide like Intellij does, eg static analysis, code coverage, profiling, etc.
        patrec 6y ago
        LSP provides the bare minimum semantic support (navigation, completion, inline error annotations and basic refactoring support) to make emacs or vim worth of consideration for serious coding at all, and only because the inferior code understanding both have even with LSP is often more than compensated by other advantages such as being able to work in a terminal compelling plugins like magit for emacs, or, at least in the case of vim, general snappiness. I like and use all three, they all have their pros and cons, but saying that LSP (via LSC or one of the other myriad of lsp-support plugins) is about as true as saying that Jetbrains + Vim plugin lets you do everything you can do with VIM. BTW: emacs does in fact have a debugger: GUD (with a bit of tweaking, it's bearable, too).
      - wiz21c 6y ago
        I'm an emacs fan. But when it comes to Java and big codebase (5+ developpers), JetBrain or Eclipse are just the way to go . They provide : code navigation and fast indexing (emacs LSP is just so slow), super integrated debugger, tons of predefined stuff to open common's file. They just more intelligence about your code packed in. With emacs it's all bare bones. So basically for me it's about big project == big IDE and everything else is emacs (which is a sizeable share !). Also, I'd say that Emacs makes my life much more pleasant too : the community, the license, the endless customization, the millions packages; that's part of my life too and the more "pro" IDE's just absolutely don't deliver on that side.
- danieldk 6y ago
  I have used vim and later Emacs + evil for years. Recently, I subscribed to the whole JetBrains suite. I had a license for IntelliJ 7-8 years ago when I needed to write Java for work. But these days it's hard to beat CLion, PyCharm et al. It's just so more productive, especially when you have to refactor code. Magit is still the best git porcelain though ;).
nullserver 6y ago
Got a massive jump start to my career by spending high school recompiling X11 and such endlessly. I have much gratitude for how much I learned. Apple had made great money in my desire to never do that again.
- danieldk 6y ago
  Why would you recompile X11? Back in the 90ies, early 00s, I did compile kernels to make them lean and enable some functionality that was not in the default kernels. But I never saw anyone recompiling X11 outside Gentoo and other source-based distributions.
  - Galanwe 6y ago
    I've had my fair share of X11 builds at different work places. The typical use case is when you have to work on some Linux dev box which does not have any (or a somewhat recent) X11 and the distribution is either too old to get one, or simply you're not root. In these cases, the simplest (though annoying) solution is to rebuild X11 and a wm from source on the box as user. Given OP mentioned he was doing his studies, I guess he was required to work on some old boxes and wanted a decent modern environment.
    - danieldk 6y ago
      > or simply you're not root. Maybe I misremember, but didn't X11 require the SUID bit set before systemd-logind if you wanted to use a GPU? (Of course, if you want to run remote X11 clients, then you don't need elevated privileges.)
      - Galanwe 6y ago
        Sure, I was talking about remote dev boxes, I would then connect to them using a local X server.
  - skeeterbug 6y ago
    I remember Gentoo linux being quite the rage in the early 2000's (at least in my office). Compiling everything and getting your system up and running was a badge of honor, I guess.
hpoe 6y ago
I hear that from people all the time who are more advanced in their careers than me. But I can't imagine finding myself in a place where I don't have my current setup. I am able to do everything so much faster having my custom i3, Emacs setup than anyone else I work with. People often comment "Wow you are able to do that so fast." Now that I discovered Vimium I consider it a UX failure if I ever have to use the mouse. Like I don't think I could ever go back to having a system that doesn't navigate by jkl;, everything else seems to slow and clunky. Like yesterday I had to upload a file and the interface only supported drag and drop, and I took it personally that I had to use a mouse. Sorry I am ranting, but after having experienced the power of the keyboard all time and the ease of doing things in the terminal how can you stand going back? This isn't rhetorical either I genuinely just wonder how you overcome the additional pointing and clicking required?
- Galanwe 6y ago
  I guess it's a spectrum. I share OP's point of view. I've had my youth years of complete custom desktop experience, every single detail under control and finely customized, on whatever distribution was the apogee of the time (gentoo, arch,...). Years passing by though, I've grown past it. Now I just install Ubuntu, I don't want to loose time on wifi drivers, keyboard backlight, acpi suspend/resume, etc. Doesn't mean that I don't customize my environment though. I've been using i3 for 10 years and would not stand anything else. Same for my vim configuration. I just prioritize some things (i3, vim) over others (distribution, package manager).
  - gautamcgoel 6y ago
    Can you explain why you're so find of i3? I've played with it but it never stuck.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      Not the original commenter here but - i3 treats individual monitors as virtual desktops instead of having them stretch across all monitors which makes it easy to shift say a workspace with a browser or a chat app into a secondary monitor without losing the current task or having to rearrange everything. - i3 lets you define keybinding modes that work much like modes in vim - i3 is very simple and comprehensible its about as non magical as can be making it using it predictable and simple
approxim8ion 6y ago
I'm there too right now. Went from using BSPWM on Arch with all kinds of custom hijinks to just sitting on KDE because it lets me go about my work without much hassle. Both have their merits, and if I was on weaker hardware I'd have no qualms going back to my WM-only setup. But KDE keeps getting leaner and lighter, and it's smooth and hassle-free for the most part.
- stemcc 6y ago
  And now we get Wayland by default on 5.22.
  - approxim8ion 6y ago
    Surprisingly usable, but I'm still holding out because one of the things I need (auto-type on KeepassXC) is still not available on Wayland. It's an active issue[1] and will hopefully be sorted soon. MOST of my workflow looks and works just fine on it though, which is very impressive. [1]: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    I have a super petty reason for disliking wayland. There are no cool retro Desktops/WMs for it. On X I can run shit like WindowMaker, CTWM and if I want to CDE. That and my xdotool scripts don’t work.
    - approxim8ion 6y ago
      Think of it this way: we get to use "cutting edge" things on Wayland now which people will be calling retro in a few years.
    - martin1975 6y ago
      Kind of have to agree w/you. I run KDE on Wayland, it's pretty good, but I'd like to have a really slimmed down desktop like XFCE run on Wayland, possibly on BSD too as well as Linux. That would indeed be killer. CDE? Man..I didn't even know CDE is around anymore.
anthk 6y ago
OpenBSD for that when it works it does OOTB. Setup cwm, some XTerms, Otter Browser/Chromium, and done. Or xfce4, paper-theme and paper-icon-theme if you are lazy. Setup the theme, edit the panels, done.
- aj3 6y ago
  > Setup cwm, some XTerms, Otter Browser/Chromium, and done. Chrome patched three high-priority security vulnerabilities last week. And OpenBSD 6.8 hasn't rebuilt their package since October 1, unless I'm missing something: https://cloudflare.cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.8/packages/amd64/ https://cloudflare.cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.8/packages/...
  - brynet 6y ago
    OpenBSD 6.8-stable packages are in a different directory, the ones you linked are -release packages which are unchanged since OpenBSD 6.8 was released. https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.8/packages-stable/ https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.8/packages-stable/ The OpenBSD package tools will automatically prefer newer packages from this location. That being said, this is a best effort, not all packages receive updates, security fixes for chromium cannot backported to 6.8-stable due to significant changes between versions, and it would be a major burden for the maintainers to update to later versions without potentially also needing to update other ports dependencies. ABI breakages cannot happen on -stable. There are newer versions of chromium available for users who follow -current and are running 6.9-beta snapshots. https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/ https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/
    - aj3 6y ago
      Yeah, well that's kind of my point. Recommending new users to install stable OpenBSD as their work/home PC/laptop is irresponsible, especially if the lack of updates (presented as stability / ease of maintanence) is explicitly mentioned.
      - 6y ago
datalus 6y ago
Same, I used to spend a week+ tweaking things ever so slightly. Now I just install a base system and use kde5 plasma. Easy to theme, has an app launcher. (Which Windows also just got, same shortcut weirdly enough alt + space).
trinix912 6y ago
I've used to do this for a very long time. I've tried to customize almost every aspect of the system. At the time, I've also used to bash on Macs a lot. I've later figured out it all stops being funny whenever I have some work to do quickly and am not in the mood for bothering with my tiling WM having too many windows open or some random broken packages. It finally clicked when I had to collaborate on a UX desgin project and it was a big pain... My teammates used Sketch and Photoshop. Sketch is not available on Linux (which I used at the time) and GIMP just didn't want to open/save PSDs right (there was always something wrong with layers). I've switched to macOS, it was quite a big change but I've since figured out I don't need to tweak every aspect of the OS just because I can. Don't get me wrong, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD... are great operating systems. They do just work for lots of use cases. It's just that customizing your OS often doesn't justify the time spent.
- Joeri 6y ago
  A linux fanboy would argue that your problem wasn’t linux, it was proprietary software that vendors won’t port to linux. They might also argue that your team should not choose software which is so restrictive. For me though it boils down to two things: (1) linux does not go out of its way to provide stable ABI’s, which makes porting proprietary software to linux and maintaining it there expensive and (2) if you are serious about doing productive work the best productivity software is often proprietary. Add those together and there is a sort of gradient over time where if you work together with non-linux users there are always things pulling you over to windows or macOS.
  - m463 6y ago
    It's unfortunate about the ABIs - I think this probably adversely affects linux stability even when you have the source and allow a recompile.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    About (1), Linux itself actually does go out of its way to provide stable ABIs as do some very common infrastructure-level libraries like the GNU C libraries. X11 itself is also very stable and both code and the protocol has been compatible going back to the early 90s. However everything built on top of those is not and does not care about ABI or even API stability and now several desktop projects are actively undermining X11's stability with Wayland. Gtk+ breaks its API and ABI every major version as does Qt - and IMO even if Qt wanted to remain stable, as a C++ library it is very hard to do. Also Qt is really middleware and its developers have very different priorities than what you'd need for an actual platform (not to mention how intentionally misleading they have been towards users of their library). There is a stable desktop API on Linux, Motif, but that is ugly and nothing targets it anymore and the company behind it nowadays actively promotes Qt instead.
paride5745 6y ago
This is why I use GhostBSD instead of plain FreeBSD. It’s like a Linux Mint experience but on FreeBSD.
asveikau 6y ago
> However, the older I get the less enthused I am about having to play around with config files That's why you leave around your config files from the '90s, you don't touch them and they still work! Sent from a FreeBSD machine running fvwm ...
- kbenson 6y ago
  > running fvwm That's the secret. I've been running Windows 10 on the desktop for almost the last decade, but ran Linux for more than a decade prior to that. If I want a Linux desktop, I know I can pull out my old archived FVWM configs and be set.
- spear 6y ago
  Yeah, I do most of my work inside VNC servers running fvwm with emacs, xterm+tmux+zsh, and firefox. My config files haven't substantially changed in 25 years. The desktop login environment has changed many times over this period (enlightenment, sawfish, compiz, metacity, mutter, mutter-on-wayland, even Windows 7 and 10 for work) but I only configure that enough to set up virtual desktops in which I just bring up VNC viewers for multiple hosts.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bengalister 6y ago
Same for me. I have spent way too much time trying different window managers: i3,i3 gap,sway,bspwm,etc. Usually you also need to find a menu bar, customize it, deal with screen locking, multiple screens setup with different dpi, etc. I stopped trying to create my personalized environment. I just installed Gnome Wayland (Arch) on my personal laptop with some extensions: dash-to-dock, unite. It is good enough for me, requires almost none maintenance and has a MacOSX vibe. It has been quite stable since I made the switch (more than a year). I still keep an i3 config that I use in a VM running on my work laptop (I prefer it over WSL2). Because I wanted to keep a very lightweight WM environment. But I don't really use i3 tiling. I just launch Tmux in a maximized terminal window. I do some light development in it with neovim and OPS from it (cloudformation, terraform,etc.). I ssh connect to it with VScode. If the CPU performance gap is not reduced between Mac CPUs and intel/amd laptop cpus for ultrabook, I think my next personal laptop will be an Apple one. I don't want to spend too much time on making the whole setup work.
- zem 6y ago
  i have the opposite use case - i would like a full-fledged desktop environment with all the bells and whistles i can get, but even more than that i want tiling. i settled for mate + i3, since gnome and kde both made it hard to replace just the window manager.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  Similar experience here. I was one of minority of die-hard Linux users until I had a hardware issue and just said f*ck it let me get a company provided mac. I had a super customized i3 setup but now on a 2020 mac I can get by just fine with the OS but the hardware is a ton better. My previous laptop was a higher end dell though not an XPS and the keyboard on this is 100x better imo and the trackpad is 1000x better. And MacOS is a bit more annoying in places but it-really-just-works and I don't think about it really. I brew installed all the gnu core utilities so now I've got gcat and g-this and g-that. I use many workspaces and fullscreen apps usually with a terminal side-by-side and my productivity is better. I guess I discounted how much good hardware means to me.
colordrops 6y ago
95% of my time re: configuration is dealing with getting suspend/resume to work and not corrupt the desktop environment. Why has this been so damn broken on open source OSes? The one thing I could do to fully stabilize my env is to ditch the gnome/XMonad hybrid and go full XMonad. That would probably solve all my config issues. Really wish that XMonad with gnome was a first class supported setup though.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  It's broken in open source because hardware is horrible but OEM's must make at least a minimalistic effort to make their hardware work with windows lest their hardware be returned to walmart. Presumably infinite effort to figure out how windows does it would yield software that works as well but in the real world of imperfect documentation and finite effort results in imperfect results. There was a thread on this a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25385860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25385860 Short answer buy hardware known not to suck at it.
404mm 6y ago
Same here. My path was pretty much Gentoo -> Arch -> MacOS. There were some slight short lasting deviations, such as Ubuntu and Suse.
deviantfero 6y ago
How often do you start from scratch when installing an OS?, I've changed my laptop 4 times now in 5 years for different reasons, when I do so, there's only a couple of things to consider: if I'm upgrading the HDD (for example when I made the jump from HDD to SSD or from my 2.5inch SSD to my M2 SSD currently) I need to clone the drive to my new storage, otherwise I only need to swap out my storage device from my old laptop to my new one. With linux it just works I don't have to fiddle for my devices to be found, everything is just where I left it, the biggest change was when I went from an intel based PC to an AMD one, I only had to switch the display drivers after the fact (I knew because X crashed, I had to do this from tty), but it is expected since the display cards are totally different, btw all it took was a: sudo pacman -S xf86-video-amdgpu. having a rolling release distro helps too, because you really don't have a reason to nuke your install and start from scratch, but even if I decided to do that for whatever reason, since most configuration is done via text files I can easily save those in a repo and just clone them to my new install and be done in a few minutes. drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Dec 25 2016 /lost+found ^ that's when I last installed linux, I've been using the same install through 5 years in 4 different devices, it's pretty cool. I'll be honest though I do still miss photoshop and Illustrator, I run Illustrator CS6 in wine, but it is missing a lot of features that have been added through the years, but Krita is a decent replacement for photoshop in the Illustration space, which is why I used photoshop in the first place, but nobody is stopping adobe from making a suite for linux I guess.
nix23 6y ago
>However, the older I get the less enthused I am about having to play around with config files Ha! i am the opposite, i love to customize my system to perfection and use it then for years. My newest project: http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/ http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/ yes i want my mainframe :)
vr46 6y ago
Is this not easily automatable? My Mac(s) is/are provisioned using Strap, and this includes configuration of the terminal/Neovim/general settings. Surely this could all be done for a BSD setup?
erikbye 6y ago
> I used to spend hours on getting things like window managers, X11, etc. set up just the way I wanted them to be. However, the older I get the less enthused I am about having to play around with config files to get basic features like suspend/resume to work on my daily work notebook. The most predictable top comment on HN ever.
pjmlp 6y ago
Same experience on my GNU/Linux zealot days, eventually I settled back on Windows, macOS and whatever Linux distributions do by default.
TacticalCoder 6y ago
> However, the older I get the less enthused I am about having to play around with config files... I'm in my late forties and I don't play with config files a lot because... Once X11 / Awesome WM is set up it is set up, well, for years. Literally years. Does not move: not a iota. At times I've had my "workstation" (just a big PC) with an uptime of 6 months. 6 months of uptime, for a desktop. That's how stable things can be. (I had my reasons for leaving my computer up at night for one of its core was computing something: but that's not the point... The point is these Linux and BSDs can be so stable you can, if you want and kernel security patch excepted, easily reach one year of uptime). My current desktop PC is six years old and I'll soon buy a new one and I'll reinstall everything from scratch: I've got notes and may need to "fight" new hardware and whatnots for a few hours (if I'm unlucky) but then hopefully I'll be good for another six years? The thing is: if you don't like tailoring your system to the way you like it to work, then you're forced to use the way others thought it'd be best for you... So, sure, it may be a bit more work than a Windows or OS X machine, but the stability and uptime is also on a whole another level.
gspr 6y ago
Me too. But that never drove me away from Linux. I just started embracing two specific things: * Sane defaults. * Slow moving software that's focused on not changing things constantly (for better or worse). I.e. Debian Stable :-) I still don't understand how people who primarily code or wrangle data can possibly prefer Mac or Windows. I'm too old for stuff changing under my feet, but at least on sane Linux distros I have some power in my hands when this happens.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lycopodiopsida 6y ago
I was a linux and freebsd user in my younger days for a decade, until I switched to macOS. Now I am approaching my 40s and I would never do a customisation craze of my younger days, where I would spend time selecting a wallpaper and themes. My wallpaper is grey, I barely see it, so why bother? But I still customise – just different things. Mac lets me customise my workflows with little effort. All the UI scripting, keyboard maestro, Launchbar actions and hyperkey shortcuts help me a lot. Computers are good at tedious and boring tasks, but I am not. It may seldom get me back the time spent for doing the workflows, but it helps me to stay sane with all the mouse-clicking, keeps my RSI in check, and gets me some satisfaction knowing that my craft is not only good for reading sales items out of the database.

by nilsb 6y ago

perfmode 6y ago

I am solemnly transitioning from neovim to JetBrains for this reason. Feels weird to be on a subscription model for my fundamental text editing needs. Life on the teat.

nullserver 6y ago
I miss when vim was my full IDE. But on a large project, I could not it keep it from thrashing the system while indexing.
- hpoe 6y ago
  I'd plug Doom Emacs my friend, all the power of a full IDE with all the keybindings of Vim.
  - patrec 6y ago
    If you think Doom Emacs has all the power of a full IDE, you have no clue about IDEs.
    - jhardy54 6y ago
      Instead of being rude and snarky, maybe you could highlight some IDE-only features that you find compelling?
    - vulcan01 6y ago
      Have you tried setting up LSC on either vim or emacs? It does everything an IDE does, aside from a debugger. Compile time errors are highlighted as soon as you're done typing, and many other IDE-like features.
      - cgh 6y ago
        LSC is just a language server plugin, right? That's not even close to covering what an ide like Intellij does, eg static analysis, code coverage, profiling, etc.
      - patrec 6y ago
        LSP provides the bare minimum semantic support (navigation, completion, inline error annotations and basic refactoring support) to make emacs or vim worth of consideration for serious coding at all, and only because the inferior code understanding both have even with LSP is often more than compensated by other advantages such as being able to work in a terminal compelling plugins like magit for emacs, or, at least in the case of vim, general snappiness. I like and use all three, they all have their pros and cons, but saying that LSP (via LSC or one of the other myriad of lsp-support plugins) is about as true as saying that Jetbrains + Vim plugin lets you do everything you can do with VIM. BTW: emacs does in fact have a debugger: GUD (with a bit of tweaking, it's bearable, too).
    - wiz21c 6y ago
      I'm an emacs fan. But when it comes to Java and big codebase (5+ developpers), JetBrain or Eclipse are just the way to go . They provide : code navigation and fast indexing (emacs LSP is just so slow), super integrated debugger, tons of predefined stuff to open common's file. They just more intelligence about your code packed in. With emacs it's all bare bones. So basically for me it's about big project == big IDE and everything else is emacs (which is a sizeable share !). Also, I'd say that Emacs makes my life much more pleasant too : the community, the license, the endless customization, the millions packages; that's part of my life too and the more "pro" IDE's just absolutely don't deliver on that side.
danieldk 6y ago
I have used vim and later Emacs + evil for years. Recently, I subscribed to the whole JetBrains suite. I had a license for IntelliJ 7-8 years ago when I needed to write Java for work. But these days it's hard to beat CLion, PyCharm et al. It's just so more productive, especially when you have to refactor code. Magit is still the best git porcelain though ;).

nullserver 6y ago

Got a massive jump start to my career by spending high school recompiling X11 and such endlessly. I have much gratitude for how much I learned. Apple had made great money in my desire to never do that again.

danieldk 6y ago
Why would you recompile X11? Back in the 90ies, early 00s, I did compile kernels to make them lean and enable some functionality that was not in the default kernels. But I never saw anyone recompiling X11 outside Gentoo and other source-based distributions.
- Galanwe 6y ago
  I've had my fair share of X11 builds at different work places. The typical use case is when you have to work on some Linux dev box which does not have any (or a somewhat recent) X11 and the distribution is either too old to get one, or simply you're not root. In these cases, the simplest (though annoying) solution is to rebuild X11 and a wm from source on the box as user. Given OP mentioned he was doing his studies, I guess he was required to work on some old boxes and wanted a decent modern environment.
  - danieldk 6y ago
    > or simply you're not root. Maybe I misremember, but didn't X11 require the SUID bit set before systemd-logind if you wanted to use a GPU? (Of course, if you want to run remote X11 clients, then you don't need elevated privileges.)
    - Galanwe 6y ago
      Sure, I was talking about remote dev boxes, I would then connect to them using a local X server.
- skeeterbug 6y ago
  I remember Gentoo linux being quite the rage in the early 2000's (at least in my office). Compiling everything and getting your system up and running was a badge of honor, I guess.

hpoe 6y ago

I hear that from people all the time who are more advanced in their careers than me. But I can't imagine finding myself in a place where I don't have my current setup. I am able to do everything so much faster having my custom i3, Emacs setup than anyone else I work with. People often comment "Wow you are able to do that so fast." Now that I discovered Vimium I consider it a UX failure if I ever have to use the mouse. Like I don't think I could ever go back to having a system that doesn't navigate by jkl;, everything else seems to slow and clunky. Like yesterday I had to upload a file and the interface only supported drag and drop, and I took it personally that I had to use a mouse. Sorry I am ranting, but after having experienced the power of the keyboard all time and the ease of doing things in the terminal how can you stand going back? This isn't rhetorical either I genuinely just wonder how you overcome the additional pointing and clicking required?

Galanwe 6y ago
I guess it's a spectrum. I share OP's point of view. I've had my youth years of complete custom desktop experience, every single detail under control and finely customized, on whatever distribution was the apogee of the time (gentoo, arch,...). Years passing by though, I've grown past it. Now I just install Ubuntu, I don't want to loose time on wifi drivers, keyboard backlight, acpi suspend/resume, etc. Doesn't mean that I don't customize my environment though. I've been using i3 for 10 years and would not stand anything else. Same for my vim configuration. I just prioritize some things (i3, vim) over others (distribution, package manager).
- gautamcgoel 6y ago
  Can you explain why you're so find of i3? I've played with it but it never stuck.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Not the original commenter here but - i3 treats individual monitors as virtual desktops instead of having them stretch across all monitors which makes it easy to shift say a workspace with a browser or a chat app into a secondary monitor without losing the current task or having to rearrange everything. - i3 lets you define keybinding modes that work much like modes in vim - i3 is very simple and comprehensible its about as non magical as can be making it using it predictable and simple

approxim8ion 6y ago

I'm there too right now. Went from using BSPWM on Arch with all kinds of custom hijinks to just sitting on KDE because it lets me go about my work without much hassle. Both have their merits, and if I was on weaker hardware I'd have no qualms going back to my WM-only setup. But KDE keeps getting leaner and lighter, and it's smooth and hassle-free for the most part.

stemcc 6y ago
And now we get Wayland by default on 5.22.
- approxim8ion 6y ago
  Surprisingly usable, but I'm still holding out because one of the things I need (auto-type on KeepassXC) is still not available on Wayland. It's an active issue[1] and will hopefully be sorted soon. MOST of my workflow looks and works just fine on it though, which is very impressive. [1]: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281
- the_only_law 6y ago
  I have a super petty reason for disliking wayland. There are no cool retro Desktops/WMs for it. On X I can run shit like WindowMaker, CTWM and if I want to CDE. That and my xdotool scripts don’t work.
  - approxim8ion 6y ago
    Think of it this way: we get to use "cutting edge" things on Wayland now which people will be calling retro in a few years.
  - martin1975 6y ago
    Kind of have to agree w/you. I run KDE on Wayland, it's pretty good, but I'd like to have a really slimmed down desktop like XFCE run on Wayland, possibly on BSD too as well as Linux. That would indeed be killer. CDE? Man..I didn't even know CDE is around anymore.

anthk 6y ago

OpenBSD for that when it works it does OOTB. Setup cwm, some XTerms, Otter Browser/Chromium, and done. Or xfce4, paper-theme and paper-icon-theme if you are lazy. Setup the theme, edit the panels, done.

aj3 6y ago
> Setup cwm, some XTerms, Otter Browser/Chromium, and done. Chrome patched three high-priority security vulnerabilities last week. And OpenBSD 6.8 hasn't rebuilt their package since October 1, unless I'm missing something: https://cloudflare.cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.8/packages/amd64/ https://cloudflare.cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.8/packages/...
- brynet 6y ago
  OpenBSD 6.8-stable packages are in a different directory, the ones you linked are -release packages which are unchanged since OpenBSD 6.8 was released. https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.8/packages-stable/ https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.8/packages-stable/ The OpenBSD package tools will automatically prefer newer packages from this location. That being said, this is a best effort, not all packages receive updates, security fixes for chromium cannot backported to 6.8-stable due to significant changes between versions, and it would be a major burden for the maintainers to update to later versions without potentially also needing to update other ports dependencies. ABI breakages cannot happen on -stable. There are newer versions of chromium available for users who follow -current and are running 6.9-beta snapshots. https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/ https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/
  - aj3 6y ago
    Yeah, well that's kind of my point. Recommending new users to install stable OpenBSD as their work/home PC/laptop is irresponsible, especially if the lack of updates (presented as stability / ease of maintanence) is explicitly mentioned.
    - 6y ago

datalus 6y ago

Same, I used to spend a week+ tweaking things ever so slightly. Now I just install a base system and use kde5 plasma. Easy to theme, has an app launcher. (Which Windows also just got, same shortcut weirdly enough alt + space).

trinix912 6y ago

I've used to do this for a very long time. I've tried to customize almost every aspect of the system. At the time, I've also used to bash on Macs a lot. I've later figured out it all stops being funny whenever I have some work to do quickly and am not in the mood for bothering with my tiling WM having too many windows open or some random broken packages. It finally clicked when I had to collaborate on a UX desgin project and it was a big pain... My teammates used Sketch and Photoshop. Sketch is not available on Linux (which I used at the time) and GIMP just didn't want to open/save PSDs right (there was always something wrong with layers). I've switched to macOS, it was quite a big change but I've since figured out I don't need to tweak every aspect of the OS just because I can. Don't get me wrong, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD... are great operating systems. They do just work for lots of use cases. It's just that customizing your OS often doesn't justify the time spent.

Joeri 6y ago
A linux fanboy would argue that your problem wasn’t linux, it was proprietary software that vendors won’t port to linux. They might also argue that your team should not choose software which is so restrictive. For me though it boils down to two things: (1) linux does not go out of its way to provide stable ABI’s, which makes porting proprietary software to linux and maintaining it there expensive and (2) if you are serious about doing productive work the best productivity software is often proprietary. Add those together and there is a sort of gradient over time where if you work together with non-linux users there are always things pulling you over to windows or macOS.
- m463 6y ago
  It's unfortunate about the ABIs - I think this probably adversely affects linux stability even when you have the source and allow a recompile.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  About (1), Linux itself actually does go out of its way to provide stable ABIs as do some very common infrastructure-level libraries like the GNU C libraries. X11 itself is also very stable and both code and the protocol has been compatible going back to the early 90s. However everything built on top of those is not and does not care about ABI or even API stability and now several desktop projects are actively undermining X11's stability with Wayland. Gtk+ breaks its API and ABI every major version as does Qt - and IMO even if Qt wanted to remain stable, as a C++ library it is very hard to do. Also Qt is really middleware and its developers have very different priorities than what you'd need for an actual platform (not to mention how intentionally misleading they have been towards users of their library). There is a stable desktop API on Linux, Motif, but that is ugly and nothing targets it anymore and the company behind it nowadays actively promotes Qt instead.

paride5745 6y ago

This is why I use GhostBSD instead of plain FreeBSD. It’s like a Linux Mint experience but on FreeBSD.

asveikau 6y ago

> However, the older I get the less enthused I am about having to play around with config files That's why you leave around your config files from the '90s, you don't touch them and they still work! Sent from a FreeBSD machine running fvwm ...

kbenson 6y ago
> running fvwm That's the secret. I've been running Windows 10 on the desktop for almost the last decade, but ran Linux for more than a decade prior to that. If I want a Linux desktop, I know I can pull out my old archived FVWM configs and be set.
spear 6y ago
Yeah, I do most of my work inside VNC servers running fvwm with emacs, xterm+tmux+zsh, and firefox. My config files haven't substantially changed in 25 years. The desktop login environment has changed many times over this period (enlightenment, sawfish, compiz, metacity, mutter, mutter-on-wayland, even Windows 7 and 10 for work) but I only configure that enough to set up virtual desktops in which I just bring up VNC viewers for multiple hosts.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bengalister 6y ago

Same for me. I have spent way too much time trying different window managers: i3,i3 gap,sway,bspwm,etc. Usually you also need to find a menu bar, customize it, deal with screen locking, multiple screens setup with different dpi, etc. I stopped trying to create my personalized environment. I just installed Gnome Wayland (Arch) on my personal laptop with some extensions: dash-to-dock, unite. It is good enough for me, requires almost none maintenance and has a MacOSX vibe. It has been quite stable since I made the switch (more than a year). I still keep an i3 config that I use in a VM running on my work laptop (I prefer it over WSL2). Because I wanted to keep a very lightweight WM environment. But I don't really use i3 tiling. I just launch Tmux in a maximized terminal window. I do some light development in it with neovim and OPS from it (cloudformation, terraform,etc.). I ssh connect to it with VScode. If the CPU performance gap is not reduced between Mac CPUs and intel/amd laptop cpus for ultrabook, I think my next personal laptop will be an Apple one. I don't want to spend too much time on making the whole setup work.

zem 6y ago
i have the opposite use case - i would like a full-fledged desktop environment with all the bells and whistles i can get, but even more than that i want tiling. i settled for mate + i3, since gnome and kde both made it hard to replace just the window manager.
gigatexal 6y ago
Similar experience here. I was one of minority of die-hard Linux users until I had a hardware issue and just said f*ck it let me get a company provided mac. I had a super customized i3 setup but now on a 2020 mac I can get by just fine with the OS but the hardware is a ton better. My previous laptop was a higher end dell though not an XPS and the keyboard on this is 100x better imo and the trackpad is 1000x better. And MacOS is a bit more annoying in places but it-really-just-works and I don't think about it really. I brew installed all the gnu core utilities so now I've got gcat and g-this and g-that. I use many workspaces and fullscreen apps usually with a terminal side-by-side and my productivity is better. I guess I discounted how much good hardware means to me.

colordrops 6y ago

95% of my time re: configuration is dealing with getting suspend/resume to work and not corrupt the desktop environment. Why has this been so damn broken on open source OSes? The one thing I could do to fully stabilize my env is to ditch the gnome/XMonad hybrid and go full XMonad. That would probably solve all my config issues. Really wish that XMonad with gnome was a first class supported setup though.

michaelmrose 6y ago
It's broken in open source because hardware is horrible but OEM's must make at least a minimalistic effort to make their hardware work with windows lest their hardware be returned to walmart. Presumably infinite effort to figure out how windows does it would yield software that works as well but in the real world of imperfect documentation and finite effort results in imperfect results. There was a thread on this a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25385860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25385860 Short answer buy hardware known not to suck at it.

404mm 6y ago

Same here. My path was pretty much Gentoo -> Arch -> MacOS. There were some slight short lasting deviations, such as Ubuntu and Suse.

deviantfero 6y ago

How often do you start from scratch when installing an OS?, I've changed my laptop 4 times now in 5 years for different reasons, when I do so, there's only a couple of things to consider: if I'm upgrading the HDD (for example when I made the jump from HDD to SSD or from my 2.5inch SSD to my M2 SSD currently) I need to clone the drive to my new storage, otherwise I only need to swap out my storage device from my old laptop to my new one. With linux it just works I don't have to fiddle for my devices to be found, everything is just where I left it, the biggest change was when I went from an intel based PC to an AMD one, I only had to switch the display drivers after the fact (I knew because X crashed, I had to do this from tty), but it is expected since the display cards are totally different, btw all it took was a: sudo pacman -S xf86-video-amdgpu. having a rolling release distro helps too, because you really don't have a reason to nuke your install and start from scratch, but even if I decided to do that for whatever reason, since most configuration is done via text files I can easily save those in a repo and just clone them to my new install and be done in a few minutes. drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Dec 25 2016 /lost+found ^ that's when I last installed linux, I've been using the same install through 5 years in 4 different devices, it's pretty cool. I'll be honest though I do still miss photoshop and Illustrator, I run Illustrator CS6 in wine, but it is missing a lot of features that have been added through the years, but Krita is a decent replacement for photoshop in the Illustration space, which is why I used photoshop in the first place, but nobody is stopping adobe from making a suite for linux I guess.

nix23 6y ago

>However, the older I get the less enthused I am about having to play around with config files Ha! i am the opposite, i love to customize my system to perfection and use it then for years. My newest project: http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/ http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/ yes i want my mainframe :)

vr46 6y ago

Is this not easily automatable? My Mac(s) is/are provisioned using Strap, and this includes configuration of the terminal/Neovim/general settings. Surely this could all be done for a BSD setup?

erikbye 6y ago

> I used to spend hours on getting things like window managers, X11, etc. set up just the way I wanted them to be. However, the older I get the less enthused I am about having to play around with config files to get basic features like suspend/resume to work on my daily work notebook. The most predictable top comment on HN ever.

pjmlp 6y ago

Same experience on my GNU/Linux zealot days, eventually I settled back on Windows, macOS and whatever Linux distributions do by default.

TacticalCoder 6y ago

> However, the older I get the less enthused I am about having to play around with config files... I'm in my late forties and I don't play with config files a lot because... Once X11 / Awesome WM is set up it is set up, well, for years. Literally years. Does not move: not a iota. At times I've had my "workstation" (just a big PC) with an uptime of 6 months. 6 months of uptime, for a desktop. That's how stable things can be. (I had my reasons for leaving my computer up at night for one of its core was computing something: but that's not the point... The point is these Linux and BSDs can be so stable you can, if you want and kernel security patch excepted, easily reach one year of uptime). My current desktop PC is six years old and I'll soon buy a new one and I'll reinstall everything from scratch: I've got notes and may need to "fight" new hardware and whatnots for a few hours (if I'm unlucky) but then hopefully I'll be good for another six years? The thing is: if you don't like tailoring your system to the way you like it to work, then you're forced to use the way others thought it'd be best for you... So, sure, it may be a bit more work than a Windows or OS X machine, but the stability and uptime is also on a whole another level.

gspr 6y ago

Me too. But that never drove me away from Linux. I just started embracing two specific things: * Sane defaults. * Slow moving software that's focused on not changing things constantly (for better or worse). I.e. Debian Stable :-) I still don't understand how people who primarily code or wrangle data can possibly prefer Mac or Windows. I'm too old for stuff changing under my feet, but at least on sane Linux distros I have some power in my hands when this happens.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lycopodiopsida 6y ago

I was a linux and freebsd user in my younger days for a decade, until I switched to macOS. Now I am approaching my 40s and I would never do a customisation craze of my younger days, where I would spend time selecting a wallpaper and themes. My wallpaper is grey, I barely see it, so why bother? But I still customise – just different things. Mac lets me customise my workflows with little effort. All the UI scripting, keyboard maestro, Launchbar actions and hyperkey shortcuts help me a lot. Computers are good at tedious and boring tasks, but I am not. It may seldom get me back the time spent for doing the workflows, but it helps me to stay sane with all the mouse-clicking, keeps my RSI in check, and gets me some satisfaction knowing that my craft is not only good for reading sales items out of the database.