• 3 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 23rd, 2023
  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.orgOPtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Turns out, I wanted a tiled window manager all along
    2·
    18 days ago

    practice the shortcuts

    You know, I used to think like that when I first learned Unix shell commands and vi. I shlepped through the learning process because I had to when I was a student. Then after graduation, I joined a Unix company so I was dragged deeper into it screaming and kicking, and I kept picking up more and more commands and shortcuts until they etched themselves deep into my muscle memory. At some point, it all stopped being a chore and it became second nature.

    And it went like that for many other software I’ve used. Decades later, I get the payoff: I’m a fast engineer and the friction between what I want to do and the final result is very low despite working 90% of the time with the keyboard.

    It was a pain to get there and it took a mighty long time, I’ll be honest. but I reap the benefits now.

    If I were you, I’d make the effort for that sort of thing. A couple of months tops: if you don’t like it, you’ll have wasted 2 months of your life. If you do, you’ll have gained skills that will pay for your efforts for the rest of your life many times over.

  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.orgOPtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Turns out, I wanted a tiled window manager all along
    5·
    20 days ago

    what i don’t like about most tiling WMs is they are keyboard only. you can’t hold a beverage in one hand and use them easily with the mouse.

    Depends. Here for example, I’m lounging in the couch with a beer in one hand, watching Youtube videos in FreeTube, chatting with a friend in Signal and lazily browsing a few browser tabs and windows the rest of the time. The browser windows are arranged in one tabbed workspace, Signal in another workspace and Freetube in a third workspace, all of which are available with a mouse click. I’m basically not touching the keyboard unless I have to.

    I guess it depends on how involved you want things to be with one hand clutching a beer 🙂 Me, that’s as complicated as I’m willing to let things get when I booze.

  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.orgtoLinux@lemmy.ml•So what did it take for you to go to Linux?
    3·
    25 days ago

    When I was a CS student in the early-mid 90s, my college had Unix only and we had to fight to get a free terminal to complete our assignments.I had a good 486DX with Windows 3.11 and I had heard of Minix, so I could do my assignments in the comfort (?) of my dorm room.

    I went to my local technical library to see if they had a box (that sort of places used to carry boxed OSes and specialized software back then). They didn’t, but they had this CD with Slackware written on it and the store owner said it was better. So I bought it on a whim.

    After many hours and a lot of recompiling the kernel and libraries right and left, the thing finally booted and ran surprisingly stable. My roommate saw it and immediately installed it on his machine. The next days we went buy a couple of 10base2 NICs, some coax and a pair of terminator, and before you know it, we had NFS going.

    It was our own Unix network and it was way better than college’s :) I never looked back.

    I did work with DRDOS as a kernel dev a few years later, which involved reverse-engineering bits of MSDOS 7 (yes, that’s the version of MSDOS Windows 95 ran on top of). That’s as close to working professionally with MS stuff as I ever got. Other than than, I’m a pure product of the Linux generation baby!