Back to my first love

Linux

Here is my current system and my long journey in Linux, the operating system of a life time with all the good and the bad, on and offs.

The journey

  • RedHat - 1997 - this was installed on all university's computers and I did not have my own personal computer at that time
  • Windows 98 - 1998 - bought my own Pentium 166 MHz PC, mostly for StarCraft: Brood War :)
  • Slackware - 2000 - because I was never happy with RPM package manager but I enjoyed the simplicity of Slack
  • IuLiX - 2002 - my own Linux distro based on Linux from scratch and Slackware philosophy
  • Gentoo / Windows XP - 2003 - starting to slip away from Linux, don't know, maybe Gentoo source based distro was too complicated/time consuming for me at that time
  • Windows XP - 2005 - no more dual boots, coincidence or not, this was also the low of my professional career :(
  • Mac - 2008 - Mac era because all cool dudes had moved to Mac and iPhone
  • Arch - 2019 - and back to my first love, should I get a "Linux per sempre" tattoo on my arm?

The motivation

Why Arch?

  1. it's a KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) and DIY (Do It Yourself) distribution - base install takes 15 minutes or so then you get a black screen and TTY prompt and the configuration party begins
  2. rollout releases - life is too short to wait 1, 2 years for next major release, in software industry you either "go big, go fast and go hard or go home"
  3. community is awesome and Arch Wiki is one of the best Linux documentation sites out there

The Arch

Arch journals and dotfiles that still need a lot of cleanup and fine-tuning but so far it works quite well and I am pretty happy about it.

For the curious minds, here are the most important tools that I use on daily basis:

Window manager - i3wm

I was never a big fan of complicated Desktop Environments (DE) like Gnome or KDE and i3wm is exactly what I need: a non-intrusive tilling window manager.

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Status bar - Polybar

This is still work in progress as I need to add more tools but for now only WiFi, battery and clock.

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Terminal emulator - Kitty

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Application launcher - Rofi

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Browser - Brave

A fork of Chromium that is focused on privacy/security without Google's non-sense.

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Window compositor - Compton

In case you don't know what a window compositor is, here is a short desc: just a cool daemon that adds shades and transparency to windows. Enjoy the sunset background of Vernazza, Italy thanks to Anders Jilden

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Editors - Spacemacs / Vim

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Others

Linux Love!

linux  arch  i3  emacs  vim