Article by a Red Hat engineer that also makes a ton of contributions to FOSS in their free time: Don’t change your login shell, use a modern terminal emulator

Hey, yeah, I know the feeling, every time I lose an already typed reply I completely lose motivation to rewrite it.

Hehe, as a precaution, I wrote this up in Emacs instead 😜.

Yeah, my pinky strain issue is completely gone

Glad to hear that!

Using i3/sway as my WM for a keyboard centric usage

Curious to see this at the very top of your list. Perhaps I should make my switch to Sway rather sooner than later. Thank you for the endorsement!

learning touch typing properly

I intend to learn this with the alt keyboard layout after the more ergonomic split keyboard has arrived. Wish me good luck 😉!

Trackball instead of mouse

Hmm…, this is lower on your list. So I suppose that by effectively removing most need for a mouse, the switch to a trackball has been less impactful. Btw, perhaps related, would you happen to be aware of hints? If so, could you touch upon its relevance?

a good chair to prevent issues with my back

Curious. Is this a special ergonomic chair (or something)?

It was a slow process of making one change here, few months later another z etc

Did you advance/progress in increments because you were testing out the latest addition to the setup? And thus, only introduced a subsequent change after judging that you were not ‘done’ yet?

all of my pains in wrist, lower back, neck, etc have disappeared.

I am so glad to read this! While the journey until I am able to interact with my systems without any pain seems far away right now, success stories like yours make me so pumped to pull through.

I figured if I’m going to ve sitting in front of a computer typing stuff for 8h a day I need to make that as comfortable as possible to be able to do it for longer.

Couldn’t agree more.

e.g. <space>srq" (Surround Replace Quotes with ") to replace the next quotes for " (e.g. changing var = 'some text' to var = "some text"). That same plugin allows me to also do <space>srb[ to Surround Replace Bracket/Braces with [ (to change the surrounding [, (, or { to [ ).

Interesting. FWIW, I did test this out and I believe that OOTB Doom Emacs does utilize the evil-surround package. However, I don’t think it’s as powerful as what you describe. Though, this could also be on me 😅.

Another plugin allows me to move to any part of the screen in 4 keystrokes, I press s the two characters of where I want to move, and a third disambiguation character and the cursor moves there.

Hmm…, this very closely resembles what evil-snipe does. Though, unless I’m doing something wrong, the functionality is not a single s away, but rather a g s SPC away. At least, OOTB*.

May I ask why emacs in evil-mode instead of Nvim?

Of course you can. Unfortunately, though, I don’t exactly recall my reasonings 😅. Thankfully, I did note some of my thoughts from back when I was actively trying to decide between the two. From there, I was able to gather the following:

• I would only try out Emacs or Neovim through a opinionated config.
• For Emacs, Doom had kinda won over Spacemacs based on the opinions (and experiences) of others . Though, I still wanted to try out Spacemacs to judge for myself.
• While for Neovim, LazyVim and LunarVim were the winning configs.

What follows is not based on my notes, but from what I can remember. Shortly after I came to the above conclusions, I went out and tried to install them. But, I wanted to ‘test’ them without ‘polluting’ my system. As such, I tried to install them within a distrobox. This is where Neovim came short because of this imposed limitation. I don’t 100% remember what it was, but IIRC there might have been more than 1 issue; one of which had to do with fonts. Regardless, my Neovim adventures were prematurely terminated 😅. By contrast, Emacs didn’t budge an inch under these circumstances. So I was able to test out both Doom and Spacemacs without any significant issues. Since then, I have dabbled in Emacs. But the folding mentioned in the original post is what has led me to commit more seriously than ever. So, in short, it was mostly out of practical reasons.

Btw, it’s funny, but most of what you just read about my reasonings were buried memories 😂. Like, if I had to answer it on the spot -so without thinking it over or look through my notes or dig through my memories- , I would probably have stated some arbitrary technical reason (e.g. org-mode FTW) OR its proven longevity OR I don’t know… something. But it couldn’t be further from the truth 😅. Granted, I’m still very much enjoying Emacs. But, I shouldn’t disregard/dismiss Neovim any longer. It’s time to revisit this rabbit hole 😂. I should also thank you for asking the question that brought this to my attention 😊!

Not OP, but when I cold turkey switched to Fedora Silverblue over three years ago, I benefited a lot from this guide.

I like stability and cleanliness. Security by default. Least mental load possible long-term.

Excellent breakdown of your desires! FWIW, I definitely resonate with these as well.

I’m currently testing out NIXos. Next will be VanillaOS, 3rd will be Fedora Silverblue.

One simply can’t ignore the fact that these are so-called atomic distros. Which makes a ton of sense considering what you set out for. FWIW, my personal takes on the individual projects are as follows:

• NixOS is pretty excellent. If the epitome of cleanliness is reached with becoming stateless, then there’s simply no other viable alternative.
• For VanillaOS, I feel it has yet to fully realize its promise. Or, at least, hasn’t fulfilled whatever’s required to break into the (relative) ‘mainstream’ for one reason or another.
• Fedora Silverblue has been my daily-driver in some shape or form over the last three years 😅. As such, I’m clearly biased. However, I’d reckon secureblue, i.e. a derivative that goes all-in on security, is actually more interesting for you.

Anyone have good recommendations? Easy backups, stability, security first posture, least maintenance and memory load. I hate getting scattered in symlinks, scripts, and filesystem placing.

Honestly, with Fedora Atomic and Nixos, you’re already considering the very best at the job. Though, for completeness’ sake, consider looking into openSUSE Aeon as well. While I’d argue the other two are currently more interesting, I wouldn’t want to dismiss it altogether.

Beyond these, we find some other distros that miss something crucial for them to be considered a legit candidate/alternative:

• Guix System can put up a decent fight against NixOS and may even sway you over if you’re into lisp. Unfortunately, though, it has yet to receive what flakes brought to the table for NixOS. Don’t get me wrong; Guix’ implementation of channels is vastly superior over Nix’ and therefore Guix System doesn’t gain as much from its (to be) flake counterpart. However, with flakes, NixOS becomes pretty smooth sailing. Like, you can just trust it to work reliably. With Guix, however, it can get ugly sometimes. Which can even lead the biggest Guix proponents back to NixOS…
• Kicksecure is another hardened-by-default distro worth mentioning. Sadly, unlike secureblue, it does nothing with atomicity.

What are some pros and cons of different distros?

This is too broad of a question 😅. If possible, narrow it down to some face-offs you’re particularly interested in. After which I will try to help out if I can. Btw, I ‘found’ this comment that attempts to assign tiers to distros in terms of how they fare security-wise.

What do you daily drive as a power user?

Without going over what a power user is and/or if I would even qualify as such, I’ve been daily-driving secureblue for over a year now.

Give me your thoughts and recommendations! Thanks.

At this point, I think both NixOS and secureblue pose as the most interesting candidates for ya. The former peaks in cleanliness, while the latter peaks in security.

Sorry fam for the late response! I was writing up a draft a couple of days ago, but that one somehow disappeared. Which…, is kinda peculiar as I don’t recall the last time a draft spoofed out of existence. Regardless, it really puts me off to start a reply all over. As such, I’ve been mustering motivation since 😅. Anyhow, thank you for your patience!

Thank you (also) for sharing your journey around the many text editors! If anything, it reminds me how life has got many surprises for us. As such, being wed to any software, regardless of how powerful it may be, may still result in a break later down the line.

Thank you (once more) for touching on ergonomics! I haven’t mentioned it, but I do experience some RSI-related pains/aches.

Anyhow, I do have concerns on how Emacs’ default keybindings might be detrimental on someone using a regular keyboard. I believe this article makes an interesting case on this. That’s also one of the reasons why I’ve (almost) exclusively been on evil mode.

I hope you’ve recovered completely from the strain on your pinky! And, hopefully, nothing else has been causing any issues since!

Btw, the trick with ci" and ca" is pretty cool! Thank you for teaching me something new! FWIW, it was reproducible within Emacs’ evil mode*.

I wonder what this means for Linux Journal as a platform.

Could you elaborate on the reform?

For some reason, I was under the impression that laptops in the MNT Reform series were the only laptops that were manufactured using open (source) hardware only. Or, if there were others, that it must have been doing something so special that they deserved to be put on a pedestal. But, currently, I don’t feel confident enough to state why it would be superior over say the Olimex TERES-I or Pinebook Pro.

I hear the hype yet to me it looks like a severely overpriced tv box with some low-grade peripherials strapped to it in the least space efficient way possible.

We definitely pay a premium, but I don’t know exactly why. Especially when the aforementioned Olimex TERES-I and Pinebook Pro are almost an order of magnitude cheaper.

Did they got rockchip to release sources instead of blobs or something?

From what I understood, Rockchip offers (at least some of) its SoCs as open source hardware. So, what MNT Reform did for the SoC is order them as open source hardware and include/publicize/provide all the schematics (etc).

What is the praise actually for?

FWIW, the open source hardware aspect is what I was intrigued by*.

Step 1 ‐ install BalenaEtcher.

FWIW, perhaps you should reconsider if you should even use balenaEtcher.

I never figured out step 1. It’s not in the software store.

Unfortunately, this does happen at times. Therefore, it’s a good idea to be aware of alternatives. One such example would be Fedora Media Writer that you may install as a flatpak. Though, the most popular is probably Ventoy.

Eventually I found an APPimg file, and it installed Balena Etcher. But it wouldn’t launch after being installed.

Unfortunately, AppImages aren’t as reliable as one might expect. Assuming that your distro supports it OOTB, you’re still often required to explicitly allow it to be run as an executable. Which is a good thing for the sake of secure defaults*. Granting it is simply done by:

1. Right-clicking the AppImage you wish to execute
2. Go into “Properties”
3. Turn the switch ON that’s found to the right of “Executable as Program”

You can put multiple ISOs on it, and choose at boot.

FWIW, the aforementioned Ventoy does just that.

This sounded like really positive news, linux as an ecosystem desperately needs to revisit its init process choices, but there really doesn’t seem to be any hint of it elsewhere.

I’d also love to see something like this come into fruition. And hate the fact that everything points towards this being some LLM-hallucination. Thankfully, while not written in Rust, we have dinit to be excited/optimistic about.

There is a rye that’s written in rust and which has an init command rye init. I wonder if it’s a case of an LLM latching on to that and just making up the rest?

Excellent observation! That’s probably it.

but describing an entire nonexistent init system without some kind of directive in that direction?

Someone else, i.e. the user called “notabot”, had already made the following interesting observations:

• rye is software that actually exists and is found within the repos
• rye is written in rust
• rye has an init command; rye init

I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to think that an LLM is aware of the above. But, it failed to understand what rye actually is and how its init command isn’t competing with systemd.

Yeah lol. There are definitely some oddities going on that I find hard to wrap my head around.

For example, last week this article was published on the same website and attributed to the same author. In the article, the author talks about the release of Fedora 41. The thing is, however, that Fedora 41 was released last October. Heck, Fedora 42 has been released for two months now. Like, why wouldn’t they want to talk about Fedora 42 instead?

Excellent find.

I also noticed this, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt as Arch is a community-driven distro and perhaps they were trying to allude to that fact.

No worries, fam! And thank you for clarifying! Based on your answer, I’ll assume that Konsole should suit you more than well for the time being. The moment you’re starting to ‘live’ inside a terminal is when looking elsewhere for something more advanced and/or powerful starts to make a lot more sense.

I’ll check out Warp/Wave, thanks!

Aight. Glad to hear that you’re interested! Have a good one, fam 😉.

So I was interested to dig more into this…, but I wasn’t able to find any other source that talked about this. Furthermore, while some digging suggests that the author is a real person, the text didn’t score well on https://undetectable.ai/ . Do with that whatever you will*

FWIW, trying to install it within a distrobox container gave the following error:

error: target not found: rye-init

Which, AFAIK, suggests that the package is not found in the repo. Nor does going through https://archlinux.org/packages/ yield any results. At this point, my best best would be to spin up a VM and see if that makes a difference. But I’m not really in the mood at the moment.

Regardless, has somebody checked the package out for themselves? Or, have they seen discussions on it elsewhere?

Hehe, you read right through me 😂. Thanks fam for the heads up!

Anyhow, I’ve learned so much from you and I really appreciate that. Again, wholeheartedly, thank you!

Wish ya a good one 😉!

I’m just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy.

OP, to be frank, descriptions like “general terminal stuff” and “nothing terribly fancy” are too generic to be useful here. Though, I suppose this is simply indicative that you’re (probably) perfectly served (as is) by Konsole.

what do you folks use

Ptyxis

and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?

Because it came with the distro and I had no need for something different.

One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i’m doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.

Unsure if I understood you correctly, but perhaps Warp and Wave are worth looking into for ya.

I got a couple I really like, though for vastly different reasons:

• The MNT Reform series takes the crown for their commitment towards open source software AND open source hardware.
• The ASUS Zenbook DUO is an early entry in the direction of what I perceive as peak design. This technology will only improve from here and I hope other vendors will take cues from this one.

Aight. Anyhow, this has been a lovely conversation fam! Thanks for your contributions!

Aight. This conversation has been much appreciated, thanks fam!

Perhaps I might have to give ed a go at some point if I find myself hacking more with elisp rather than outputting actual productive work. But, at least for now, this is (thankfully) not really a concern for mine 😜.

As for Sam, I should either install a different OS (i.e. 9front) for the truely special experience. Or…, build it (myself) with plan9port. Did I get that right?

What’s better? KDE? Or GNOME?

This is very much just personal taste and can even change from device to device; i.e. some folk swear by GNOME on their laptops but they also happen to swear by KDE Plasma on the desktop.

At the end of the day, you’d have to test it out for yourself to see which one you like better and under what circumstances.

And, finally, avoid giving too much credence to the exaggerated caricatures that are often presented in the online discourse.