Übercomplicated

Sounds like you’d love a tiling window manager (if you aren’t already using one). What you describe is a big part of the philosophy of tiling WMs. I like Sway, might be worth checking out, though I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve already tried tiling WMs. I only suggest it, as I’m convinced all tiling WM users compulsively mention it…

I use hyprland btw.

I’ve had a pretty intense widows peak since teenagerdom and have also gotten regular compliments on my hair since teenagerdom. Coincidence? I think not!

For a long time I used a super customized zsh setup. It was, unfortunately, crazy slow and regularly broke on updates. It had precisely all the features and behavior I wanted though. Like you say, zsh is very customizable.

Then I switched to tiling window managers and with that to the alacritty terminal. This made me value start up times and performance, as I was constantly opening and closing terminals. So I spent a ridiculous amount of time optimizing my zsh config to be as fast as possible. This is also what I used for a long time before correcting my ways.

When that device, my work laptop, failed, I had to set up my desktop for work. This involved setting up zsh, which I quickly realized was a lot of work. So, on a whim, I installed fish.

Oh my god. Not only did fish have nearly all the features I wanted out of the box, but it was easy to add plugins (customizations) in a performant way. Fish even had default behavior I didn’t know I needed. And most importantly: it was crazy fast!

Since then I have never left fish. It is so much better than anything I had imagined. At this point I use way more default features as well, so I pretty much only add the tide prompt and zoxide. I also have a functions and abbreviations folder which is essentially my zsh alias collection.

The crazy part is really how much faster it is though. I really, really love it. And now they’re rewriting it in Rust as well!

Edit: my bad, seems like I misunderstood. PopOS used/is still using GNOME and has a Auto-Tiling plugin that behaves like i3wm (?). I guess this is what OP is talking about!

Not entirely sure what you mean. PopOS, developed by System76, uses the Cosmic DE, which is itself also developed by System76.

River is a dynamic tiling WM which is known for it’s customizability among Wayland WMs, as it doesn’t distinguish itself with it’s “layout generator” (though it does come with a very basic one), but instead let’s the user write their own or use an existing, third-party one. This way you can achieve essentially any dynamic tiling behavior with River.

How does PopOS use a system like that? Or do you mean that Cosmic is DWM-style, i.e., dynamic and with tags?

I do agree that River is wonderful though!

On that note also:

• Alacritty: a minimalist Wayland GPU-accelerated terminal. Claims to be the fast currently available terminal. Also the coolest name ever. This is what I personally use, in combination with tmux.
• Kitty: a more feature rich alternative, also Wayland, GPU-accelerated, and on par with alacritty for speed. Actually starts up a little faster but uses up more resources and sacrifices in other performance metrics (in my experience).
• Foot: another minimalist Wayland alternative, but this time CPU driven. Despite this, the performance is still on par with the others. I think this is especially good for laptops and such that run on integrated graphics.

I should say I’m pretty biased because I’ve been using vim since highschool, but the post seems a little crazy. I’m almost wondering it it’s parody…

His palpable hatred towards vim in particular seems irrational though. Felt like much ado about nothing to me. I might be missing something though?

Admittedly, I’ve had great experiences with Enterprise in the US. It blows my mind how expensive it is, but I’ve never had any issues like what OP posted.

I am so fucking angry. Fuck Alabama.

The Serval WS is also more than twice the price of my Pangolin… and I had a one year warranty, so I’m not sure what you mean with lifetime support. As for the specs (i.e. the screen etc.), yeah, they are great. But the case is very poorly designed on my pang12, and gets bent out of shape, which can cause mechanical failure in the hinge, quite frequently, despite the aluminum chassis. My complaint is just that it is far from rugged, which is problematic for me, as I travel a lot with it. But your mileage may vary.

PS: one more thing that really bothers me is the known problem with the touchepad on the pang12, which regularly fails. Mine also came with a faulty motherboard, which suggest bad quality control. Over all, these issues have caused me to lose faith in System76 hardware.

I have a Pangolin 12. While it has great specs and software support, the build quality is horrible, and over the course of two years now, I have had to screw it open and bend the laptop case in position more often then I’m comfortable with. It is the far, far opposite of rugged, which is the main reason I want to replace it. Twice now, it has just randomly decided to not boot for one or two weeks…

Anyone here have a StarLabs laptop (briefly mentioned in the article) and am opinion on it? I’m thinking about replacing my crappy System76 laptop and looking for something with good build quality.

The VLC thing can be solved relatively easily by installing opi with zypper, and then running opi codecs, which will add all the necessary repos and install everything. After that VLC (and h.264 etc) will work like a charm.

I use librewolf, with default settings, as my main browser. If a page doesn’t work (which is quite rare for me) I usually turn of uBO which does the trick. There are of course a few known culprits that don’t work, like Netflix. I have brave installed for that kind of thing 🤷.

Also Tor is definitely not more usable then Librewolf…

Could you point out any specific sites that don’t work for you?

If it’s a pure DAC, it’s default output will likely be between 1 to 2 Volts RMS. If your listening on iems or ~30 Ohm headphones that is gonna be crazy loud. It seems like you are using digital audio control to manage this (i.e., the audio level in your DE), which is possible, but certainly not ideal. It also is kinda bad for the audio quality, as you are digitally remixing it, and if you ever switch to high impedance headphones (or already have), the output current will be sub-ideal.

If I’m assessing your situation correctly, then this is quite easy to solve though. You just need a preamp! This will give a nice knob to control audio with much more precision and finesse. I know that both JDS Labs and Schiit Audio offer headphone amps with built in preamps in the USA. I can highly recommend the JDS Labs Atom Amp 2. In Europe your a little more limited, but FiiO has some nice options I think.

Of course none of this is necessary if you don’t want audiophile levels of quality, but it would boost the audio quality (presuming your DAC doesn’t have a proper preamp), and would certainly give you a tactile, wonderful knob.

I can certainly attest that my HD600s sound quite a bit better out of a JDS Labs Atom Amp 2 than out of just my DAC or—god forbid—my Mobo audio… They sound even better out of my vintage 100W Onkyo amp, of course, but really not by much. I am really impressed by the Atom Amp. I initially just bought it for travelling, but it has now basically become my main amp lol.

Okay, ramble over.

I have yet to encounter a VST that doesn’t work at minimum with yabridge. I gotta admit though, since I switched (ca. 3 years ago now) I find myself using Linux native tools much more that the VSTs I used to depend on so much. I use airwindows (full Linux compatibility) much more on the VST front, and find myself replacing many windows VSTs with pure data or supercollider…

Some cool Linux tools I’ve discovered and are now dominating my workflow:

• Reaper (https://www.reaper.fm/), also super common in professional studios.
• airwindows (https://www.airwindows.com/), genuinely amazing and FREE!
• Pure Data L2Ork & Max (https://l2ork.music.vt.edu/main/make-your-own-l2ork/software/), literally infinite possibilities.
• Supercollidor (https://supercollider.github.io/), you can never have too much Supercollidor…
• Orca Sequencer (https://100r.co/site/orca.html), basically my default sequencer now.
• old-school tracker (my fav: https://schismtracker.org/)
• and much, much more!

Also audio management (routing, etc) is sooooo nice and faaaast with jack in Linux. Literally a dream. If anything, I think my experience has significantly improved since switching to Linux vis-a-vis audio production.

And Reaper and Bitwig!

I had a 3060 Ti.

I couldn’t game on Wayland for about 20% of my games (very frustrating), couldn’t use specific Window Managers like Sway, experience constant screen tearing on X11 (which I often had to use, because the game would crash on Wayland) when gaming, and had a significant performance hit in some games.

CS:GO ran like a dream and actually better than on Windows, but with the release of CS2 my performance on Linux was about 20% worse than on Windows. My 1% lows were also crazy on Linux (median=190fps, %1=80fps). This meant, among others things, that I just couldn’t play death match anymore — my FPS would make it unplayable. This was largely an optimization issue and I think some of the 2025 Nvidia driver updates of improved the situation a little for CS2 specifically. The screen tearing on X and the buggyness on Wayland were enough for me to switch though, even if eventual improvements might come.

I am now extremely happy with my 7900 XT, which I got for less than any available 9070 XT (in my region) and which amusingly actually has better performance in CS2 then then the 9070 XT on Linux. It’s massively overkill though, I could have just as well gotten a 7800 XT or 9070 (non-XT).

I am still very, very pleased. Hopefully this will last me a few years, unlike the gosh darn 3060 Ti.

Alright, I’m done with my huge block of text. Hopefully this was helpful.

I’m pretty sure clap is completely cross platform, which is pretty cool. But the infamous VST is unfortunately not; you need to create separate Linux and Windows VSTs :(

Dyslexia strikes again…

You’re right, I wasn’t really being sarcastic. Configuring neovim (or really anything) for exceedingly long times is fun!