Uses

A list of software/hardware I use or have used.

Priorities

Since finishing my undergrad and starting work, my personal laptop is no longer my primary workstation. I find that most tasks fall into either small technical work (e.g. setting up my homelab, reconfiguring my desktop, writing/editing a small personal project), writing (e.g. writing this page, taking notes for personal use), or light browsing. While the workload on this laptop has changed, the priorities for the most part are the same:

• Balancing speed and efficiency with maintaining a personal touch. I still think faster than I can type or execute things, anything that gets me closer to doing things about as fast as I think (provided I have sound thoughts) would be appreciated.
• Balancing a preference towards security and privacy with convenience and usability. These are inversely correlated, so finding an optimal balance can be a challenge.

Hardware

• Laptop: I’m currently daily driving a ThinkPad P15v Gen 3 AMD. It’s more compact and feels significantly lighter than my P52/P53, but at the cost of the keyboard quality and durability. The keyboard sounds more hollow and loud (and is somehow worse than my more recent ThinkPad P16s I got at work), and it doesn’t feel as bulletproof as my P52/P53, much less the T430.
  • I also want to finish setting up my ThinkPad P53, but given that I got the P15v in 2024 and only finished setting it up in 2026, it might take a while before I finally do something.
  • I run one SK Hynix P31 SSD and one other SSD in the P15v, and the P53 is absolute endgame with 3 2TB P31s.
• Desktops: I also have an Optiplex 7060 SFF for hosting services on my homelab. It comes with 8TB of storage, but I hope to expand my storage sometime in the future with a dedicated PC (which already exists, I just need hard drives) serving as a NAS. I also have a fairly old Mac Mini which attempted to host Bluebubbles but hasn’t been successful.
• Peripherals: I have a Logitech MX Master and two keyboards: a Varmilo V87M and a HHKB. The MX Master was my first decent mouse, and to this day I’m a big fan of the multiple device support and horizontal scroll. As for my keyboards, I’m not using them much at the moment due to the superiority of ThinkPad keyboards and the fact that I might want to learn a new keyboard layout.
• Other Hardware:
  • I have two phones: an iPhone 13 Mini and a Google Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS. What would be optimal would be merging GrapheneOS and the solid battery life of the Pixel with the tiny form factor and the Apple ecosystem of the iPhone, but one can only dream.
  • I also have a Garmin Edge and a Garmin Forerunner to track my bike rides and general health and activity.
  • Toying with the idea of getting an iPad to run Zwift in the winter but also further expand the Apple ecosystem.

Software

Core

• Operating System: Arch Linux. I dual-boot Windows 10 IoT LTSC and Arch on my P15v, but the rest of my systems are on Arch.
  • I had early exposure to Linux but as a kid when my dad switched our home PC to Ubuntu. I always found Linux to be more of a downgrade and an annoyance at first until my first laptop exploded on Windows 11. I asked my dad to help me install Ubuntu on my new laptop, and somehow I went off the deep end.
• Terminal: kitty
• Shell: zsh
• Window Manager: hyprland. I’ve always been a Wayland enjoyer since I started using default Ubuntu back in 2022, immediately pivoted to Sway, and then recently toyed with Hyprland on the P15v before I decided to daily drive it.
  • Status Bar: ashell
• Text Editing: (neo)vim
• Web Browser: Firefox. I’ve tried qutebrowser but found the lack of add-ons and some browser incomptabilities a dealbreaker for daily use. I’ve also tried Librewolf at the request of a friend and realized I preferred having my own user.js scripts for privacy as opposed to less control over the user.js options and updates with Librewolf.

Utilities

• File Manager: yazi. In some ways, it feels like a crossover between lf, my previous file manager, and oil.nvim, which I used to use for file navigation in Neovim. It has a lot of nice built-ins (file preview, handling file opens, to name a few that I instantly noticed), Vim motions for rename, and lots of customization via scripting (Lua my beloved) and community plugins. The caveat is that configuration is a bit more wordy.
• Music/Audio Player: mpd/ncmpcpp. I have an offline music workflow made up of the following with the intention of creating a small, reliable library I can use anywhere such as on a bike ride or a flight:
  • Audile to recognize music I might be interested in,
  • SpotDL to download music and preserve song metadata,
  • AIMP/VLC for listening on my phone (one upside of Android is AIMP as the VLC experience is far worse),
  • Syncthing to keep the music library updated between my phone and computer.
• Video Player: mpv, but I pretty much only use it for viewing shorter/local videos - trying to stream YouTube with mpv is a dice roll depending on the internet connection.
• RSS Reader: newsboat. Somehow still useful to track most blogs and YouTube channels in this day and age.

Services

• Email: ProtonMail. Decided I needed a new personal email to consolidate everything after realizing that my Gmail accounts I used in middle and high school are just glorified garbage cans with a bunch of random mailing lists and accounts for random things I’ve created over the years. I heard good things about ProtonMail from friends and the internet, and thus I made the switch to ProtonMail. As an unexpected plus, Sieve filters are probably the best for email filtering I’ve seen.
• Password Manager: Bitwarden came installed with Librewolf, and after moving around relevant accounts to my ProtonMail addresses, I also decided to update some older passwords which I was constantly forgetting, and decided to give Bitwarden a try. I also have a self-hosted instance of vaultwarden, but I doubt that I will use it until a few Bitwarden features get ported over such as archived passwords.

Once Used

Notable pieces of hardware/software I once used. The HP laptop that blew up and caused me to make the switch to Linux gets an honorable mention.

Hardware

• Gigabyte U4 UD: the first laptop I ran Linux on. Very thin, light, and portable, but unfortunately meant it lacked battery life - it took about two years before the battery stopped being able to sit through back-to-back 1.5 hour lectures, and that was it for the Gigabyte.
• ThinkPad T430: I really wanted to use this ThinkPad and I definitely spent more than I should trying to upgrade it, but it kept having issues with the display. Haven’t had the bandwidth to pick up on this laptop so it’s been left abandoned for a while.
• ThinkPad P52: Used this laptop daily for almost 2 years and had inklings of selling it eventually to set up the P53 and P15v for over a year. The P15v experiment finally got me to sunset this, and I also finally sold the P52.

Software

• Ubuntu: I kept Ubuntu around for much longer than needed since Zoom was having issues on Arch, and I still needed it for school, but Zoom started working on my P52 around the same time as the Gigabyte’s battery was starting to fade, so I stopped using the Gigabyte and Ubuntu at the same time.
• Sway: I still have fond memories of searching up how to set up and use Sway, but the hyprland experiment has convinced me that hyprland is the new frontier. Along with sway is a graveyard of tools that I switched from.
  • waybar has been replaced by ashell, which is easier to configure
  • gtklock has been replaced by hyprlock, which is part of the hypr ecosystem and easier to configure
  • go-sct has been replaced by hyprsunset, which is part of the hypr ecosystem
• Spotify: While I haven’t fully removed Spotify from my life, most of the time it’s just used to search up and sample music before I download it, and the majority of my listening happens via mpd/ncmpcpp, AIMP, or VLC.