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.
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.
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.
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.
Gtk is pretty much only relevant on Linux, the Linux desktop is itself a tiny fraction of the desktop market, and the amount of developers who're willing to write GUI apps for Linux, to write documentation or tutorials on the subject, etc. is already extremely low. So you'd think it makes sense to keep things as stable as possible, to make sure that no unnecessary effort is wasted and to encourage people to improve their apps or write new ones.
But apparently the Gtk people don't care. So much effort has been wasted due to stability issues, not even talking about the multitude of good-willing people who got burned in the process and just stopped caring about Gtk altogether. It's really a sad state of affair.
> (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
Which in the end is a valid point.
I've seen offices fighting with their own MS Word templates because neither current MS Word versions nor alternatives like LibreOffice can correctly display and format them anymore. Meanwhile Microsoft Team's online Word is not 100% consistent with the offline package, and when you need your PDF export to just work it's not fun when suddenly PowerPoint decides to always invert the colors for no reason.
Then there are cases like the subscription-based Adobe tools which are nice until you happen to be in a country targeted by a US trade embargo and overnight your subscription is cancelled with no way to even access your own files in cloud storage. Oops.
Is Gimp inferior to a billion dollar corporation's top-seller? Sure. But I know tomorrow I'll still be able to open all my files on almost any device running a desktop OS. If you earn your salary with this kind of software that's still not very convincing of course and I get that, however on the other hand when you depend on this kind of software to be working reliably it's worth considering how much you really want to depend on some corporation's servers being online when you need to rely on it.
Not only that, skills you learn on an open platforms don't really expire. I spent a while getting pretty good at using both Photoshop and GIMP, but these days I'm not using Photoshop enough to warrant paying a subscription fee to use it when I do need it. Those skills and time invested in using it essentially go to waste without a license. GIMP, on the other hand? I've been benefiting from the time I've invested in it for over 15+ years now without a hitch.
This doesn't seem dissimilar to how one could ship software for windows.
By the way, I use a tiling window manager (dwm) and I can’t figure out what you mean by “tiling WM having too many windows open”. I also don’t understand why free software such as the Gimp should be expected to support the binary file format of some closed-source program. But I do understand the need to work with other people without making excuses, even if their choice of tools is shortsighted.
Tiling WMs only work for me when I have <5 windows open. Afterwards, they just become a huge mess, unless you have a big screen with a huge resolution.
> I also don’t understand why free software such as the Gimp should be expected to support the binary file format of some closed-source program. But I do understand the need to work with other people without making excuses, even if their choice of tools is shortsighted.
I'm not saying they should be responsible for supporting a random (tho admittedly quite ubiquitous) proprietary format. But on the same topic, where would Open-/LibreOffice be without support for docx/pptx/xlsx? If they never support any proprietary formats then there's no alternative to what everyone else uses.
If you have the privilege of choosing what to work with in all situations then it's of course not a problem. But one can't expect a group of UX designers to completely break their workflow for a project with a strict deadline just because one person holds onto their sacred OS.
Or you can just use several virtual desktops.
The GP comment is so backwards that I wonder if they even used a tiling wm for any period of time longer than a day or two. Tiling window managers are better at managing many windows than having them all scattered randomly over a desktop with a traditional window manager.
Let us propose you have a really tiny 12" screen and you are using 5 windows that each really need your full screen area to be useful. It makes no sense to split it 5 ways so instead each window is its own workspace. This hardly seems to be a situation where a tiling window manager benefits you you could very well arrange the same thing on any graphical environment by switching to each workspace opening each application and maximizing the window.
However what it did do was keep you from dumping all 5 windows in the same workspace because the result would be painful and ensure that instead of alt tabbing an average of 3 times per window switch or taking your hands off the keyboard and clicking on a ui element to select the individual app from the taskbar. Instead when you want to go from app 1 to 5 or app 2 to 4 you go directly to the correct workspace.
It also automated maximizing the windows as they were created.
To put it succinctly it encouraged a certain workflow and automated the window management steps when using that workflow.
This is also true if you have 18 windows and 3 28" monitors. By far the most common arrangements are going to be simple arrangements of 1-3 windows on the same monitor which can be automatically applied as windows are added.
If we consult one of my favorite infographics
To save 2 seconds 100 times a day (not depicted) we can spend 96 hours learning to use a tiling window manager and come out ahead over 5 years. In reality the time required is probably on the order of 2-4 hours and as it is a low stress, simple activity it can trivially be done during downtime in the time when you would spend on social media as opposed to when you ought to be working.
In effect you are trading a few hours of playtime for 96 hours of more effective work time which if you think about is a pretty good trade.
It's also entirely possible that you don't enjoy this workflow and thusly wouldn't benefit which is OK too.
Insofar as LibreOffice vs Gimp you are entirely correct. On a related note Bloom although not free claims to have great PSD support
>You say Bloom imports PSD files. What specifically does it import and does it support layers? We understand why this question comes up. :) A lot of packages claim to import PSD files, but then either end up importing a single flattened image, or layers stripped of styles, masks, and blending effects. We are proud to have created the best-in-class PSD importer for Bloom, which supports not only layers and groups, but also masks on both of them, all layer blending modes, and even layer blending effects such as drop shadows and glows - even on groups! While we can't guarantee the documents will look pixel-perfect compared to Adobe Photoshop (they are completely different software packages, after all), they are very close in terms of their appearance, and all key information is preserved.
I haven't tried it personally but it has a free demo.
As a bonus, a full system backup is a simple folder copy to a USB stick, and with that stick I can instantly continue working on any machine, Mac, Linux or Windows.
Basically the moment you start to use Linux desktop, you will immediately start googling how to twist this and that. Maybe in an hour, you will start to go to this and that folders to change this and that cfg files. For me, I quickly realize that 1) I won't remember what I did and I don't know all the implications of those changes I made, and 2) I don't want to spend time on those stuff.
That's why I keep a log of everything. Any error message I encounter, any change I made and why. Neatly organised, in an org (org-mode) file.
I make exactly the same as I do in programming project or server configuration: keep notes, explaining to my later self (and to others) what I did and why.
> 2) I don't want to spend time on those stuff.
As I commented already: then you're forced to adapt to things others thought it would be best for you instead of adapting the system to your way of working.
That really depends on a) what you choose to customize, and b) how adept you are at customizing. In other words, it depends on your skill and foresight.
With enough practice - you get it by simply working with computers over the years - you can recognize the pain points with the biggest payoffs quite accurately. With enough skill, you can fix them relatively quickly. This way you get a "10x" setup tailored for your specific needs.
Of course, trying to indiscriminately customize everything while putting a lot of time into learning how to customize them is a net productivity sink. That's normal. Most people start with such approach, get burned by it, and conclude that the whole customizability-as-a-feature is not worth it.
It's quite possible that it's true for majority of users. The well-tuned, A/B tested, in-depth researched defaults can be good enough for many. I have nothing against such defaults. However, forcing me to use them, while I know precisely what I personally need to be more productive, is something I can't agree to.
My current setup is Linux, AwesomeWM, Firefox, and Emacs. I customized away all the pain points I had with them a decade ago (half a decade with Awesome). The time spent on maintaining the configs across upgrades is trivial, on the order of tens of minutes a year.
To sum it up: customizing your OS can be well worth it if you do it right. You can also go wrong with it, too. But, using software which doesn't allow for customization not only removes the risk of customization going wrong - it also robs you of the possibility of doing it right.
Amen brother! Exact same setup here: Linux / AwesomeWM (with a dedicated modifier key on my keyboard only for AwesomeWM related keybindings), Firefox, Emacs and the occasional IntelliJ IDEA for Java stuff.
> The time spent on maintaining the configs across upgrades is trivial, on the order of tens of minutes a year.
Exactly.
Of course it does, spending a tiny bit of time optimizing my workflows here and there, now and then, whether OS or text editor, saves hours yearly. Not to mention reducing annoyances and plain friction.
Hahahaha. Keep telling yourself that.
I have much gratitude for how much I learned. Apple had made great money in my desire to never do that again.
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.
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.)
Compiz times with the cube desktop and compiling kernels overnight in my Pentium 4 kept me away from making out with girls many times.
Eventually, you'd get tired of all the options and switch to something more stable, especially for servers. I have some fond memories of Gentoo and emerge and compiling all of my software, just so. Sadly, it was never very stable... and not really through any fault of it's own. Really, the customization you could do was great... but there was always one more thing to tweak, one more knob to turn...
Badge of honor -- yes. I'd almost call it a requirement for someone to work through once or twice.
Because watching 'configure' output scroll across your screen 40 times makes one a computer expert, natch.
Imagine starting out with Linux today and not knowing that systemd isn't the only option for an init system. (Regardless of whether or not you like it, it's helpful to know what alternatives exist).
In the end, with Gentoo, when you had your config set, yes, you'd get hours of compiler messages. And if you were lucky, none of them would be errors.
But you'd also know how the system worked. Honestly, it was also about control. With Gentoo, you could configure the system exactly as you wanted, down to the compiler flags. How many other systems let you really do that? Instead of targeting a well-known arch (ex: i686), Gentoo let you set your compiler flags for the entire system to match your exact CPU. The upside was that it was your system. The downside was that it was your system and if/when it broke, you'd have to figure it out. If your goal is to learn how to use Linux, that's also a feature. If your goal is to have a stable server, not so much.
Like the original parent commenter, I was playing with Gentoo back in the early 2000's, so much has probably changed. But I definitely learned a lot back then.
> With Gentoo, you could configure the system exactly as you wanted, down to the compiler flags.
This doesn't give you the control you think it does. Most of the customization you refer to is basically adding a USE flag to make.conf and running "emerge whatever" again, which I maintain isn't much of a teaching tool.
You end up learning about Gentoo, not software, compilers, operating systems, or computers.
> Instead of targeting a well-known arch (ex: i686), Gentoo let you set your compiler flags for the entire system to match your exact CPU.
This is a good example. So many people ended up thinking (incorrectly!) that this benefited them in some meaningful way, and thought that they were learning and customizing, when they still don't know, even a decade on, that '-O2' and '-O3 -march=native' are for almost all tasks indistinguishable from a performance standpoint or how to even go about measuring the difference.
Gentoo is like a show on the History Channel: it sure feels like you're learning!
Now I use Macs on the desktop and linux on the server.
All I really wanted at the time was a Photoshop clone (GIMP). Broke high schooler that didn’t want to pirate.
A Linux Mint install normally consists of a friendly gui installer followed by installing common software from an app store interface. It's more friendly than installing windows.
When's the last time you installed windows? I installed w10 about 3 weeks ago and I: - Plugged a USB key & Ethernet cable into my PC - clicked through a handful of GUI options - Made a coffee
And when I returned (~15 minutes, I didn't time it), it had installed windows, done the post-install reboot crap, and was ready for me to install my own software. Out of the box I had internet connectivity, power management, semi-modern graphics drivers (< 3 months old) and was ready to rock.
Going through the recovery tools built into windows was pretty easy but nothing including "refreshing" the OS which is basically just a reinstall while saving your files didn't work either and ultimately I had to just start from scratch.
When I did the reinstall I decided to switch it from legacy to EUFI boot and enabled that. The installation of windows tried to get me to link my account with my imaginary microsoft account. Opting out of that is designed to be confusing. Then it tried to get me to enable invasive telemetry with promises of functionality I didn't care about. It wouldn't have worked anyway because without changing another peripherally related option in my motherboards settings menu windows consistently malfunctioned when enabling networking in a way that was not an issue under Linux. One hour later thinking I had somehow created the windows install usb with the wrong option I figured out what was wrong and finally had windows working again.
In the course of 6 months windows had to be installed twice and took over 2 hours total time and tried to trick me into tying my ability to use my own computer to their permission and giving up my privacy.
The only reason I bother to keep it around is that its still easier to game under Windows. Might as well call it XboxOS because its surely unsuitable for any other use.
[1]: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281
That and my xdotool scripts don’t work.
Forget easy to build; it's in the official ports tree; you can `pkg install cde` :)
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 ...
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.
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?
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).
- 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
- There's very little learning curve with i3. After setting/learning 2 or 3 keyboard shortcuts you're good to go. That makes the adoption a no brainer.
- 99% of what I do is done in a shell (code, sysadmin) or a browser (read doc, write doc). That means I often need a lot of shell windows all over the place. The tiling really helps here. I could use tmux/screen for that (that's what I did before i3), but I often already have tmuxes on the remote boxes I ssh to, and the inception makes navigation harder.
- it's fast, there no animation or latency whatshowever. I can very quickly open a shell, ssh, run a command, close it, etc.
Most of these could be done with any keyboard oriented tiling wm, I just so happen to use i3.
The biggest keys to remember is f which shows all the links you can click on. I should add a disclaimer however that I ended up using vimium probably only 50% of the time, I've noticed when I am in the middle of working I use vimium more heavily, during light browsing I tend to use the mouse a bit more.
I will also say the other big thing that wasn't possible before Vimium is that I can now add a bookmark to pretty much any page I will visit more than once and then that page is only a 'Shift + b' and a couple of keystrokes away. Super efficient when dealing with giant bloated web apps that take 5 seconds to render every state change.
There's a lot more, but you can go a long way just with that.
$ ls -l .vimrc ls: .vimrc: No such file or directory
However, as a counter example, instead I've spent time on learning how to use Ansible which lets me automate parts of my job in a way that just wasn't feasible 15 years ago. To me that provides a much larger benefit (easily 10X, maybe even 100X).
I guess my point is that I don't want to spend too much time on the plumbing part of technology and leave figuring that out to someone else - much in the same way we're using libraries nowadays instead of re-implementing hash tables ourselves in every new project.
For me, like many things, it is a tradeoff. Am I THAT more efficient in some uber config - balanced against the time it takes to fix/update/tweak/keep it current, and deal with multiple systems and repeated setups.
And the answer for me is, well, no, no I'm not. So these days I use a much smaller set of "must have" custom configs and mostly go with the defaults.
>a UX failure if I ever have to use the mouse
I can see that for certain systems/applications. But, I have to deal with various webapps - jira, confluence, continuous integration settings, our internal source code instance, etc - and I can't imagine the scenario where spending the time to configure and learn keyboard-only navigation would result in an efficiency payoff.
It's similar to the argument about why dvorak/colemak/workman/etc is "better". Yes, yes they are, but there is no way I'll ever get the time back in efficiency that it would take to become proficient. I'd need some outside motivation, such as RSI or an injury to alter the cost-benefit calculation.
I don't need to turn every webpage I need to deal with into a keyboard optimization puzzle in order to shave a few seconds here and there. That's the time savings we're talking about right?
>I can't imagine finding myself in a place where I don't have my current setup
Do you mostly work on a single system?
That's the beauty of Vimium, it gets you 90% there, but those 90% work the same everywhere.
What changed that was the frequency of needing to set up a working environment from scratch, for whatever reason whether that be a fresh OS install or a change of personal or work machines. After a while it becomes tiresome, both in initial setup and in maintenance (regardless of OS, highly custom configurations are more brittle and can break in more ways).
I still customize a fair bit but generally speaking I keep things closer to default and gravitate towards OSes and distributions that come reasonably close to where I want my environment to be out of the box so the amount of setup and maintenance is reduced to something sustainable.
keynav to the rescue! (As I’ve said before it’s no replacement for proper vi bindings like Vimium or better Pentadactyl, but it is useful as a second-to-last resort before a hardware pointing device.)
Dragging is not bound by default but it is easy to uncomment in the example config (cp /usr/share/doc/keynav/keynavrc ~/.keynavrc and gg72 in vi on Debian):
### Drag examples
# Start drag holding the left mouse button
#q drag 1
# Start drag holding middle mouse + control and shift
#w drag 2 ctrl+shiftI'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.
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.
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.
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.
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/...
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.
> New users should be running either -stable or -release.
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq5.html
EDIT: Haven't used OpenBSD in a while, but unless I'm misreading https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq10.html, syspatch & binary patches only apply for release branches - in which case you would need to either deal with obsolete packages or compile them yourself. On the other hand if you where to track -stable branch you would get semi-regular binary packages (not everything for example no chromium, but at least you get firefox), but in that case syspatch won't work and you'd need to recompile kernel & userland.
Also, which exactly packages get updates is completely non-transparent for the end user if they follow official instructions.
Not true. There is both syspatch(8) to apply binary updates and sysupgrade(8) to upgrade to the next release or snapshot. And there are regular packages available for -stable and -current.
> New users should be running either -stable or -release. That being said, many people do run -current on production systems to help catch bugs and test new features.
Is the full quote from the page you linked. I won't reply to you further as it's clear from other replies here you have an agenda.
current branch is very clearly not meant for new users, that's mentioned in various faqs multiple times.
You do have some huge misunderstandings of -stable/-release terminology and how they apply to the base system. Especially with the introduction of binary syspatch(8). There is no longer any incentive to compiling the -stable sources yourself, as the distinction between -stable and -release + errata patches has largely been lost. In the past it might contain changes not worthy of an errata, for instance, but these days that would be exceedingly rare.
You're right, there's no -stable packages for chrome. Boo hoo. What you don't see are the lengths OpenBSD has gone to protect users of these gigantic pieces of software, such as the tight integration of pledge(2) and unveil(2) by default. Heavily restricting to entirely removing filesystem and network access for every unique process type. Leaving only access to the ~/Downloads directory.
And also, as far as I can tell the newest Firefox version available on -stable OpenBSD right now is 82.0.3 which was released in November.
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.
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.
The most predictable top comment on HN ever.
It’s like a Linux Mint experience but on FreeBSD.
* 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.
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.
There was a thread on this a while back
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25385860
Short answer buy hardware known not to suck at it.
Feels weird to be on a subscription model for my fundamental text editing needs.
Life on the teat.
BTW: emacs does in fact have a debugger: GUD (with a bit of tweaking, it's bearable, too).
Magit is still the best git porcelain though ;).
Ha! i am the opposite, i love to customize my system to perfection and use it then for years.
My newest project:
yes i want my mainframe :)