"I hope you don’t mind me asking but what keeps you coming back to #Emacs? I am currently wondering whether to look at #Neovim again - it does seem to be faster and with a strong community around it."
Apologies for the delay, #HaikuOS fans. #MAME is currently building. I foresee no issues, so I should be able to get the pull request done to HaikuPorts tomorrow morning (UK time).
#tmux is really handy for this sort of work. I need to see if there's something better than VNC for remote desktop access of Haiku from Linux for testing graphical apps.
@llii@Presi300 It was made for apple users and evidently so (it's basically #alacritty and #tmux but closed source, cloud-based and with some AI bullcrap on top of it)
Linux vim, emacs, neovim and/or tmux users, what terminal emulator do you use and why? I heard about kitty, but idk if I really need all of that. For context, on mac I use neovim with iterm. #linux#vim#neovim#emacs#tmux#debian
#MAME 0.262 for #HaikuOS patched and compiling. Please stand by...
(#tmux on Haiku is very glitchy, whether running locally or over SSH. Look about halfway down the htop list. Getting a "stable" screenshot takes time.)
Over the last decade, I had to adopt several "modern" professional tools, pulling me out of the #Emacs bubble I had built up over the first 3/4 of my career. Graphical Email, modern browsers, video conferencing, Slack, Outlook, Calendaring and Jira. My return to #Emacs in #tmux on my #OpenBSD server, my happy place, has been eye-opening.
I still have a bailout for interacting with modern shit, and my work laptop is still MacOs. I am still cursed with Slack and Jira and Chrome for work. But now that I have my safe space back, I don't find myself as frustrated during the day when I have to use the modern sub-standard tools. It's saving me some stress budget for sure.
@louis Heh, sounds like we are on a similiar trajectory. I am considering a X1, but first I'm going to take a crack at dual boot #OpenBSD on the M1 Air.
I'm already compiling a list of tasks for that, starting at gettting my #Rustlang pwget util able to handle write operations on pwsafeV3 DBs, then figuring out why #tmux is munging lined with wide utf-8 characters, and then on to whatever drivers I'll need to touch up to get the M1 usable as a daily driver (if any?).
Decided that I'll limit several sources of content, youtube, patreon, podcasts to my phone or AppleTV for now, makes it an easier leap. The M1 will always be dual boot.
To keep my setups in sync, I previously used #nix. I had a single flake that would produce nix-darwin or nixos systems and home-manager modules. That required gigs of disk space, and the declarative power came with several layers of abstraction to learn and debug.
All of this leads me to unwinding a decade of Apple patronage. My mind if just calmer, my soul happier, with text and a ps auxww where I know every process, and have read large parts of it's code and man pages in the last couple decades.
It all let's me focus on the "problem domain" that interests me most -- connecting with humans, collaborating, and mutating our brains together.
My parting shot, err, question. What is it holding you back? And what if you didn't have to make some clean break, or declare some purity, but just make it a game, an experiment, an art project?
A Linux distribution is a similar concept to a phone’s app store. It allows you to download software that’s pre-vetted. This reduces the chance that it’s malware and allows the different dependencies to work together to reduce redundancy. However, you MAY optionally get software OUTSIDE of the package manager and directly from the software’s developer, through universal systems such as Flatpak, AppImage, or Snaps.
If you get software from OUTSIDE the package manager, then you’ll have double dependencies which takes up space and causes some minor delay in starting up the program. Many in the Linux community argue and debate over if the delay, space, and security issues matter, or if it’s more important to have software that works across distributions and is released faster. The delay on Snaps is worse than others, leading SOME to criticize Ubuntu which heavily uses them. This is why Mint is a fork of Ubuntu but WITHOUT Snaps. Others point out that without universal package managers, it can take YEARS for new software to make it to distributions with slower release cycles such as Ubuntu and Mint.
A Linux distribution is NOT the way Linux LOOKS. That’s the desktop environment! So if you like a distro’s software, you can swap it for any other desktop environment than the default. For example Linux Mint’s “Cinnamon flavor” look, could be put on Debian or anything else! At the end of the day, distros DON’T matter that much and anything is better than Windows… even snaps =)
>"At the end of the day, distros DON’T matter that much and anything is better than Windows… even snaps =)"
That having been said, I'm a firm believer that "Friends don't let friends run ewb00ntew!" Yah, that's kinda a little disparaging tagline I came up with a decade or so ago. I think it's cute, but it does express my sentiments.
I was sooooooooo tired of answering the same question for about twenty years, searching for new ways to say it, and shifting from one fav distro of mine to another, and then back again. But I really failed to acknowledge the need for #n00bs to experience instant gratification to hold their interests long enough to just ditch the #Satan of Redmond (Windows) for that of freedom and privacy in the form of one of the most incredibly steep learning curves I was actually expecting those people to climb after having their questions answered.
#Slackware still tops the list to this day - it is so powerful and.... yes, simple - but that's what us sysadmin's say. Concepts like sbin/lilo and fdisk partitioning or manually editing etc/fstab real quick coz I know what I want as special mountpoints over NFS or whatev.... "OH the Horrror!", is prolly what any of those n00bs seeking to escape the apron strings of #Microsoft likely said, right before making a pinata in my effagy to bludgeon.
#Debian, and I am a proud and self-described Debiantard, isn't (wasn't) really much better back in the day, even with auto provisioning of partitions and the #GUI based install it sported... "non-free-firmware... huh? Why am I looking at a blank terminal with a command prompt's blinking cursor, instead of pretty little windows with a mouse pointer?"
#Arch_Linux, #Gentoo, and others not historically worth mentioning at this time weren't any better, because they were better, and far superior to the semi-n00b-friendly distros at the time. #Redhat 5.0 - 7.22 weren't that bad actually, the newcomer could actually fumble their way past the installation (and even choose the Redneck language for foshizzles and giggles), but like you mention above, obsolescence loomed imminently with gobs of #RPM Hell, especially if you went out to somewhere like RPMfind.net or another place where you could do an rpm -ivf <packagename> and then discover you broke your google... (prolly Alta Vista back in those days), but you could seriously want a really good application and find out that you have to put the lotion on its skin - or at least have a current copy of the AutoTrader to take your mind off the predicament that landed you in the bottom of a pit.
Enter #LMDE... Lemme say that again: Enter LMDE!!!
Now I had something I could recommend to n00bs that split the difference between a rolling distro and a plug & pray installation! All that non-free firmware that was so confusing for so many back then (can't get your display to work, can't this or that and aaarrrrgggghhhhh).
LMDE tracked Debian Testing but installation was as easy as just installing Mint with all of the firmware you needed - people started thanking me twice (they always thanked me once, and then a week later swore to unleash painful, bloody vengeance upon me for burying them in documentation that they could in no way comprehend). The problem, previously, was one of the tenants of my religion - "You can do it right.... Or you can do it twice!"
The truth was, they couldn't even do it AT ALL the first time, and I'm telling them to use a simple distro like Slackware or Debian - nevermind the the 3 stages of Gentoo (They don't even offer those staged platforms anymore, it was too involved for even seasoned aficionados of source based distros).
There was SuSE, but it was as ephemeral as Redhat, and for a while in those early days, I was able to wholeheartedly recommend Mandrake Linux, which had a beautiful DE and easy install, but they went public just prior to that big "POP" of the dotcom bubble and were vaporized.
Yes, When Mint came along I was elated. I could recommend LMDE, and the user could install and easily manage their desktop - and it was a rolling distro too!
Then came the realization by Clément Lefèbvre that without considerable funding there was no way the team could even have a life of their own or watch their kids grow up if they continued to support what was almost effectively two separate, but equally in appearance, distros. I must applaud the Mint team because they did gracefully migrate the LMDE folks back into the mainline Mint over a period of a couple of years.
Then I stopped recommending Linux Mint - "Friends don't let friends run ewb00ntew!"; Remember? Then, a couple of versions back, I caved with the announcement that Clément had decreed those evil "Snaps" would be disabled (If you tell me what you want what you really really want... as the Spice Girls said...). Yes, of course, you could manually enable it - just like Shuttleworth hiimself defended the Shopping Lens malware because the users could simply disable it - Huh? Disable shopping Lens? How in tarnation could a n00bie even know what to look for in the package manager to make that malware go away????
But I digress. If you really wanted to, you can enable Snaps in Linux Mint, but it's disabled by default - and for good reason, as you pointed out. Now, it's been a couple of years since I've looked, coz I no longer can be persuaded to answer that question anymore (um.... Okay, I'm back to recommending Slackware, Debian, or Arch again, but prefer to just set up a laptop for friends and say, "see? Just like Windows, huh?"). But here's what I would really like to see.
Now that non-free-firmware (since the pre-Bookworm vote in the community) is a very easy option in Debian proper, I would really like to see Linux Mint migrate back to a Slick Debian and just fricken' ditch Ubuntu altogether. My thoughts have always been that the firmware was the major issue that prevented them from getting 100% behind the upstream in the first place (I could very well be wrong about that).
Things I like about Ubuntu??? Um..... gimme a sec... Lemme think... Errr...
Byobu
That's it. #Byobu. And IMNSHO, that's really just a pretty skin over #tmux anyway, but it's got some kewl status widgets you can embed at the bottom of the screen. Speaking of #screen, Byobu IS NOT screen - it's tmux underneath, but it does default to ^A instead of the tmux default of ^B, but that's easy enough to change. What I really like about it is that it's a bit more user friendly in that you can customize it for your users and have it AutoStart sessions as soon as they log in - but there I go again, imposing what I think is kewl on people who really just need things as close to point and click on next ==> next ==> next ==> next as we can get it for them.
You see it wasn't all that long ago that even Windows needed an occasion tuning from your local PC Field Tech, much like our pianos do. I see no reason why we can't at least instill the responsibility for having a third party on retainer for quarterly or bi-annual maintenance of our Linux laptops either - I mean, just look how assimilated everyone still running Windows has become since Windows is free to pillage your privacy in the wake of Win10 forced updates?
Well, I'll close now, but did want to mention that your profile's stated mission sounds really refreshing to me - and I might just doing a copypasta of the link to your profile the next time someone asks that age old question.... Which Linux distro should I start off with?.
I run #neovim inside #tmux inside a #terminal inside a #tiling window manager. Coming up with window/pane management shortcuts for each of them that don't clash, AND remembering them all is a big pain 😑
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills
I installed a few different distros, landed on Cinnamon Mint. I’m not a tech dummy, but I feel I’m in over my head....