Dolce far niente (literally 'sweetness [of] doing nothing, sweet idleness')...
Let's put it out there: desktop environments and window managers on the BSD's are simply there to give sysadmins a decent experience. As server OS's they are phenomenal, as desktops the better part of meh. Before the pitchforks come out: I've done quite some FreeBSD installs, even made a how-to for KDE Wayland back in the day. A FreeBSD base install for the dummy I am myself. Mango & River window…
Not only the title of an excellent song by the Doors, but also a nice descriptor of my mindset. After a month in the woods it's time for an update. When it comes to Linux and its flavours, I've been changing a lot over the years. Part of the New Shiny Thing Syndrome, and also part of The Learning Experience. Curiosity didn't kill this cat and I've explored a lot during those times. And I'm very…
I've always had a weak spot for NixOS. Don't really care about flakes and home manager, but that you declare one configuration that rules all is incredibly powerful. No more adding firewalls, bluetooth or zram, put it in that configuration.nix one time and it'll stay there. Applications you want are in and the ones you don't are excluded, just like enabling services. Don't need something? Just…
A couple of weeks ago Daniel Sternberg put out a blog post announcing the Summer of Bliss for the month of July. I quote: 'The curl maintainers will use this time of less pressure to take in some extra air and to enjoy the summer. Maybe stroll outside a bit more. Breath. Some of us may spend some of this time to see other places.' As a self-proclaimed nerd, tech sales guy, freelancer and on and…
OpenSUSE, or at the time Suse, was my first Linux experience. It must have been around version 6.0 in 1999 and came in a box, with two books and 6 CD's. Immersed at the time in Windows, Macintosh, graphics design and CAD programs we didn't know anything about Linux, but it made a lasting impression. The German engineering in computing, solid, well documented. Over the years I moved over to the…
Lately I installed Fedora Cosmic, with LUKS2 encryption, secure boot et al. It was an excellent learning experience, but it also involved some manual actions during installation. I remembered OpenSuse offered this whole setup integrated in the installer, with only the Cosmic Desktop to be added. This guide describes all that, from ISO to Desktop, and how to get there. Have fun! First off: get the…
I'm done with T2 Linux. The appeal of T2 is being a source-based distro, that runs on many, many hardware platforms, even MIPS and PowerPC. As such it's an amazing piece of engineering, running Plasma 6.7 Wayland on that (and of course x86_64, ARM, Risc and now even with a Musl/Clang version). Liking and using Slackware & Gentoo myself, the compiling challenge didn't look to be that hard. Once…
All this Hyprland stuff in which I was also genuinely interested (lua! shiny & new!) has become totally superfluous for me. About two years ago Hyprland started developing an entire eco-system of applications and tools, all around the windowmanager. You might ask whether the typical WM user wants this. I personally prefer to set up all elements myself, but that's me. It's cool if you're invested…
Obviously I'm a rolling type of guy. Previously Arch, Tumbleweed, these days mostly Slackware Current and partially Gentoo. And FreeBSD. I always liked to be on the bleeding edge, and having found out about the Latest branch in FreeBSD it was a no-brainer to do that rolling here also. Now, for a bleeding edge thingie, like Mango, Niri or probably even Hyprland, that makes perfect sense.…
Me and Gnome. Not a heavenly match. And, per usual, I went gaga over the restrictive Gnomish way of doing things. Gotta give it to them: it is consistent, and many features just work. It is just not for me, most of all (besides theming etc.) because it doesn't fit my preferred workflow: I like my applications to open on specific workspaces or tags or whatever and immediately shift focus to them.…