Linux
As a Desktop OS
The approximate story of my Linux journey, as seen on and saved from Twitter years ago:
I began experimenting with Linux before Pop was a thing, and although Manjaro existed I never heard of it until a few years ago; and there are some others there that I couldn’t identify by the logo. But it’s true that I began with Ubuntu, which at the time was the premier desktop distribution; these days I think it’s Fedora. For me, the peak of Mount Stupid was indeed Kali and Qubes, and the Valley of Despair was indeed Arch. I ultimately made my way back through Lubuntu – which I loved before LXQt replaced LXDE – and then Debian – which is still too bare and backwards for many nice features – finally converging back on Fedora, the greatest balance of all the things you could ever ask for in a desktop distribution. When people tell me they’re interested in using Linux, I tell them to use Fedora and never stop using Fedora.
Although I do continue to have nagging thoughts that Arch is the Way…. It probably is – it’s certainly the most fun – but it’s a time-sink. I have dreams of making my own personalized Arch distribution—but no. Lots of scripts and total distribution-independence is the way. I think this is what most fascination with Arch is, really: the desire to achieve distribution-independence.
This is a public repository where I host all the configuration files I share across my machines. A certain amount of it is Linux-specific, and a certain amount of it is Fedora-specific, but I try to make it clear in the READMEs what’s what. The READMEs are as much for my own records as they are for others, but I try to write them with others in mind. Obviously, my configurations are optimized for me, an academic philosopher working mainly in areas that require extensive LaTeX use. I try to be optimal in my process, and this repository, I think, reflects that.
Home Server
I keep a small home server, which I call nousowl, to run experiments and services that belong on my own hardware. Details can be found on the site I host from the server, here.
Preferred Applications
- Editor: Neovim. My configuration can be found here. I’ve done a bit configuring Emacs, too, but I honestly got addicted to the keystrokes when I started using Neovim. See here for more details. I use VimTeX for LaTeX, but I’m extremely partial to my own snippets over the automatically-generated ones. I have some other nice plugins for other purposes, too.
- Desktop Environment: I’ve been partial to GNOME for years; the out-of-the-box Fedora Workstation experience is too good. But lately I’m using Sway (the Wayland successor to i3) on my laptop a lot.
- Terminal Emulator: I’ve lately been using both WezTerm and Alacritty, although I am partial to WezTerm.
- Diff and Merge GUI: Meld. This is useful to me not so much for managing code but for managing article drafts that were forked for various reasons.
- Email, cloud storage, VPN, password manager: Proton. I pay the $100/year or whatever. Proton is awesome. You get what you pay for. Read about its history here.
- Image Editor: Although I’m not big into editing photos, I do end up using GIMP quite a bit. These days it might feel lacking compared to editors that have AI-integration, but for my purposes it’s entirely adequate. In fact, I’ve never found a limitation in GIMP.
Honorable Mentions: I do use Thunderbird for email, although less because Thunderbird is so great and more because it’s the best there is in Linux. I also occasionally use LibreOffice applications – especially Calc (which is like Google Sheets or Excel) – which actually is fairly good software. I can’t imagine anything Microsoft Word or Google Docs has over LibreOffice other than cloud integration. I suppose I might also mention Okular here—KDE’s PDF viewer. I use it only because it’s the best Linux has to offer, but it is quite good.