terminal only

Just ordered some digital photo frames for xmas gifts, and neither one of them work. One is apparently an opened box return. Trashy!

Not a fan of already huge trucks with giant heavy batteries all at head level to me in my 2002 subaru.

Snagged a thinkpad today for just over 100$. Guy mentioned it was because of windows 11. Its hippie christmas for linux!

The consensus seems to be that implementation inheritance leads to code that is difficult to understand and difficult to reuse. Its perhaps the main reason C++ is banned from the kernel.

people performatively declaring they are going to Linux doesn’t bother me at all. its good press, builds its reputation. people try new things for deep reasons sometimes, but also for casual curiosity and fashion following, and that’s ok.

With a machine like that, you’re firmly in the mainstream of linux. Almost any distro will run well on it, so selection is a matter of taste.

Debian is a solid, conservative option, though they have a reputation of lagging behind other distros in terms of software versions. I do like arch, their wiki is first rate. It has the reputation of being finicky but I’ve always found it pretty straightforward. Great for the extensive docs and not trying to insulate you from the system.

I personally would avoid ubuntu these days, they seem to be leaning into the Ubuntu Way for things like installing software. A bit lock-in ish for me.

FWIW I’m running nixos on my thinkpads, works great. Nixos is not to be undertaken lightly, there’s a lot to learn and docs are meh. Stability is second to none, and the declarative configuration management makes it great for easing into devops.

to me the main difference was having to use a different package manager. so no biggie really. and arch has an awesome wiki. the documentation made things too easy so now I use nixos BTW

for xmonad commands. also windows-p is dmenu.

LF?

sounds like a better solution is don’t use docusign

I dunno about ‘friendly’, but my setup is minimal configuration and about as stable and unchanging as the terminal. Its xmonad with xfce in no-desktop mode. My xmonad configuration is extremely minimal because I mostly don’t care about customization. I set terminal=alacritty and the thickness and color of the outline around the focus window, and that’s it.

Because I have xfce backing me up, I get the benefit of monitor layout, mouse settings, the xfce session logout window, etc etc.

As for using xmonad itself. You’re just going to have to pull up the keyboard reference on your phone until you can get around ok, there’s no help and no explanation. When you boot into it you get a blank screen lol.

For launching programs, you windows-p and you get the dmenu program launcher at the top of the screen. Type the first few letters of whatever program and hit enter.

For me, phones on the LineageOS compatibility list. But then I’m looking to de-google, and I don’t care about having the latest phone.

To me the main thing is to relate to a computer as a programmable device, not just a shiny box with pictures and videos. To that end, it might be more effective to have the computer be in command line mode rather than it just being a conduit to youtube.

I started on an apple II at a friend’s house. BASIC was built right in to the command line. Our family ended up with a TRS-80 compatible which also had BASIC. Back then everything you needed to know was in the TRS-80 basic manual. I spent hours and hours making games on it.

Perhaps something like LOGO? Some simple command line environment where the knowledge required is small, and there are easily reachable payoffs for making loops and so forth.

but ctrl-c to cancel terminal tasks predates the 1980s. the inconsistency came in when apple decided to ignore that precedent and introduce ctrl-c, ctrl-x, and ctrl-v as shortcuts in their graphical UI.

to achieve consistency, probably better to invent a new terminal type that does away with the accumulated cruft of 50 years. problem is you would also need new cli programs to go with it.

I get those 3 bulleted features in my terminal, alacritty. But not with Shift. For highlighting I’m pretty much limited to selecting text with the mouse and ctrl-shift-c.

For more sophisticated text selection, tmux comes to mind. Default key bindings appear to be emacs-esque, though vi style is possible too. Custom keybindings are possible as well. It does seem like you may be forced to enter a special mode for selection rather than having that available all the time with just shift.

Its less work to use keyboard shortcuts to arrange/navigate windows in tiling than it is to use a mouse + alt-tab. Window sizing and placement is something you think about a lot less. Its very fast to flip through various preset window arrangements and usually that’s good enough for whatever task.

having to constantly replace mice

I got a oneplus 6 to install nixos, but I’m currently using LineageOS as I kind of got stuck on the nixos install, and I needed a phone. I previously had nixos on a pinephone and it was cool but too slow to use seriously.

I have a second oneplus 6 with a wonky usb port, am going to try to fix that and maybe give nixos another go. Sounds like its even more hassly than I thought!

Glad to see someone’s working the bugs out.