NEW WORKSTATION, NEW DISTRO, NEW WINDOW MANAGER, NEW, NEW NEW!
(Posted 2016-11-21 16:25:14 by corey_reichle)
So, got a new workstation, and along with that came migrating all my stuff
over.
Now, while I use Ansible [
http://www.coreyreichle.com/2015/04/09/getting-started-with-ansible/ ] to
manage the configuration for the system overall, much of my config boils
down to personal dot files in my home dir. So, I was using rsync to keep
things in sync between my primary workstation, and my backup workstation.
It works, more or less. Sitting down between machines is easy-peasy, and
they both feel the same, and work the same.
However, I felt I needed a "clean break", as I have collected quite a bit
of cruft lately. So, the rsync was broken, my homedir on the primary was
backed up to a tarball, and with my new machine, I chose a distro.
Manjaro Linux is where it's at! Why? Well, ArchLinux looks really neat,
as I do love the breadth of the AUR. Most any package is available to
build. Manjaro, because they took the Arch distro, placed a minimal number
of sane defaults in place, and built a good desktop experience around a
couple of window managers, i3 specifically.
I am loving i3 window manager, since playing with it on PCBSD. I love that
Manjaro gave you a decent place to start with in i3.
Also, many of my apps I've changed out. Not using Pidgin for chat, using
Finch now. Finch is a TUI-based version of Pidgin, and my keyboard-driven
work keys really well into it. And, I don't lose any of the functionality
either from Pidgin.
I was using Alpine for email, and it worked well. I finally moved over to
Thunderbird from Evolution, only because I could never get Calcurse working
correctly with caldav. I think it's a caldav issue, really, and nothing
against calcurse. Otherwise, it was great. I still use Alpine when I'm
checking mail only, and not worrying about calendaring.
My biggest change, since I do a lot of terminal-based work was, shockingly,
my terminal emulator. I always hated on xterm. It seemed clunky, lacked
features, and felt like "Just the minimal required terminal features". I
preferred mate-terminal, as it had all I felt was lacking. Turns out: I
was just uneducated. After digging into xterm, and customizing it to my
liking, it now very much prefer it over mate-terminal.
And, I've solarized everything with a light theme, wherever possible. Even
my tty's. So, now, I look like a hipster hacker :P
My workflow productivity has jumped with these changes, and my only problem
now is I have to keep myself from customizing things too much, as it's easy
to kill 5 hours getting your desktop to look and respond just how you want
it to.
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