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   mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Dec-2024 19:19:27 JST mhoye

   Just deleted a bunch of words about linux after somebody asked for suggestions, because once I'd typed them out I kind of thought, I bet nobody else wants to live like this. Nobody's moving to Bouvet Island because Pitcairn Island or Alert are getting too mainstream.

   • Embed this notice
     mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Dec-2024 19:19:25 JST mhoye

     in reply to

     First of all: it’s fast. As in "fast like computers are supposed to feel" fast.

     The creator of Grep once famously said, the best way to make programs fast is to make them do almost nothing, and this computer - which is running a little four-core ARM SOC - feels responsive and snappy in a way that _nothing ever_ does anymore.

     Second, it is - for the most part - comprehensible. At least as far as I can make it, building on the shifting sands of Systemd's treachery and DBus' ersatz convenience.

   • Embed this notice
     Ben Zanin (gnomon@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Dec-2024 19:19:25 JST Ben Zanin

     in reply to

     @mhoye oh did you see that systemd 257 announced a new focus on an API to replace its own use of dbus, called varlink?

     https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1002398/d8e7bd4a6107e0a7/

     https://lwn.net/Articles/742675/ (from 2018, earlier announcement)

     > Poettering noted¹ that one might say that documentation for sd-json and sd-varlink is ""barely existing"", but there are examples of using them within the systemd source tree.

     ¹: https://mastodon.social/@pid_eins/113429681346022072

     Chucho :artix: repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Dec-2024 19:19:25 JST mhoye

     in reply to

     • Ben Zanin

     @gnomon "we let the linux audio guy have init and now he's working at Microsoft" continues to go as well as that sounds like it would.

   • Embed this notice
     mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Dec-2024 19:19:26 JST mhoye

     in reply to

     (Oh, also: install gedit, foot, toot, w3m.)

     Now, put your own ~/bin/ at the front of $PATH and create your set of bash aliases. They mostly look like:

     ff="cage -s firefox"

     ddg="w3m lite.duckduckgo.com"

     They mostly end with >& /dev/null && clear"

     Set up the per-project shell history hack: https://gist.github.com/mhoye/469ed97d7887b451da5d45b87acb53f5

     Set your console font. I made one - https://github.com/mhoye/city99 - but it's like cooking. Might be better to make your own, but if you can't, store bought's fine.

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     mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Dec-2024 19:19:26 JST mhoye

     in reply to

     Finally, as you start doing more things regularly, start making more aliases for them. History | uniq -c | sort -n periodically will tell you what you should make a short, memorable aliases for.

     Cage is a Wayland kiosk tool - it runs one program full screen, the -s option lets you switch away or back via c-a-Fn#. The only thing I think I'm missing here is something that automounts/ejects USB drives under ~/mnt, which I believe is possible in console-land but haven't figured out.

   • Embed this notice
     mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Dec-2024 19:19:26 JST mhoye

     in reply to

     So: why? This is not the easy path. Exactly zero other people in the world have the computer problems I have now; error messages that do not exist anywhere except my screen and the program source if I'm lucky are part of my life. If something doesn't work, I'm on my own.

     Honestly, the real reason is "because you're not the boss of me, that's why". I did this because I'm more stubborn than I am smart and I wanted to. Maybe why I wanted to will resonate with you, though.

   • Embed this notice
     mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Dec-2024 19:19:27 JST mhoye

     in reply to

     Install Debian server edition, select ssh and nothing else. Immediately use the /usr/bin/policy-rc.d trick to disable future autostarting of any services.

     Install screen, tmux, sway, cage, Firefox with ublock origin, noscript and disabling page-chosen fonts. Install nmtui and nmcli, glow, z, etc.

     See: https://github.com/mhoye/moderntools/

     Set user TasksMax to 95%. Install pulseaudio.

     Set up htop and dmesg on tty11/tty12 respectively. Do not do this in prod. This is for pets, not cattle.

     Next: aliases.