As the year closes I want to get an early start on my [theme for next year]({filename}/202212201918 Year of Reflection.md) and reflect on the apps and systems that I used in 2022 and how they may change. This is entirely stolen from the Cortex podcast via The Orange One’s blog.
This is my first full year using Linux for everything, after making the move in 2021. I started using Arch (by the way) around April, specifically with EndeavourOS. Prior to that I was using PopOS as a more gentle introduction to full-time Linux usage.
Part of the decision to use Pop was that it included NVIDIA drivers and other amenities that in theory made gaming on Linux easier. I was also very attracted by the minimalism of the GNOME desktop environment, and as an entry level Linux system I have no complaints. This also worked pretty well because Pop is Debian-based, and at the time I was still using an old laptop as a server running Open Media Vault.
Desktop Environment
My desktop environment as of this moment is i3 with some light personal configurations. Most of my time is spend without any bars showing so that all that is displayed on my monitors is the applications I’m using. This idea of just seeing the apps themselves was part of what attracted me to GNOME’s whole “stays out of your way” philosophy, though I guess that environment didn’t stay enough out of my way.
Until about a week ago I was using LightDM as my display manager. This is the program that greets you when you start your computer and asks for a login prompt and password (and also lets you select your desktop environment, if you have more than one installed). The reason I was using LightDM was simply because it ships with EndeavourOS and I did not make any changes to it.
Recently a friend of mine showed me Ly, a much more minimalist DM that I immediately installed on both my desktop and my laptop. I can’t really prove it, nor do I care to do any bench marking, but I swear my computer starts up just a bit faster since it only greets me with a minimalist login screen.
Shell
The shell is a computer program that takes commands from your keyboard and then hands them off to your operating system to perform. One usually interacts with the shell via a terminal emulator or command line.
My terminal of choice remains xfce4-terminal running the friendly interactive shell (also known as Fish). I have tried a few other terminal emulators before, but in the same way that I like how i3 can just disappear, so too with xfce and minimal configuration.
My terminal windows are displayed without borders and with low opacity so that the text itself seems to float above my wallpaper. I combine this with Fish for its ease of use and easy syntax.
I don’t really do a lot of bash scripting so having Fish doesn’t really affect me too much (and if ever I need to write something in bash Google is just a browser away anyway!). In any case, I have also installed Fish on all my computers and servers, so ultimately I have a fairly uniform environment where I can run anything I want.
Text editors
I primarily use three different text editors: Obsidian, Lite-XL, and Neovim.