I uses to be a huge Apple fan pre-2010. Everything worked, was smooth, wasn’t Windows, and it was fun trying out the terminal despite it being pretty useless for most things on Mac.
At the new decade is when it felt like Apple was becoming what it is today: a walled garden with priority of mobile devices at the detriment of Macintosh. Started to really look at Linux as an alternative (only tried Ubuntu in a VM around the time of Unity coming out) early 2010s, but didn’t make the full leap until around 2013 when I installed Linux Mint and got a Raspberry Pi to begin to mess around with. Now I solely run a mix of Debian and Void on all my machines and I couldn’t be happier.
There are several readily available key modifiers in Linux: Meta, Super and ISO-Level3-Shift. You can map them to keys and use them for various purposes.
What I do is map Meta to the left Windows key, Super to the right Windows key, and ISO-Level3-Shift to AltGr (that one might already be default). You can then use Super and Meta as modifiers to trigger all kinds of actions, like Super+T to open a terminal, Super+F to toggle fullscreen mode for current window, Super+Space to toggle music playback etc.
ISO-Level3-Shift will create diacritics when combined with normal keys, provided you choose the correct keyboard layout. This is useful for being able to type correctly in languages that use diacritics, but to also allow you to use a generic US keyboard so you can do programming for example.
To make these mappings you have to edit or create a file called .Xmodmap in your home dir. To bind a keycode to a physical key you say something like keycode 134 = Super_R, where 134 is a physical key code that you get from the tool xev and Super_R is the code for what you want it to do. Also, to make Super_R a modifier you have to say clear Mod4 and add Mod4 = Super_R. Most desktop environment will import .Xmodmap automatically on startup but if they don’t you can run xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap.
Once you got Super acting like a modifier and bind it to the key you want your desktop environment settings will probably let you define custom shortcuts for anything you want. Please note that there’s usually two different places for such shortcuts, one for generic shortcuts (for launching apps), usually in the keyboard section of preferences, and one where you can tie shortcuts to window functions (like minimize/maximize), usually found in the window section of preferences. Also in the window preferences you can do some cool stuff like use one of these modifiers to drag or resize windows.
Also see if your keyboard preferences let you pick a “compose key”. The Pause key is usually used for this, because it’s not useful for anything else on a graphical desktop. The compose key lets you create diacritics in an “intuitive” way, by combining two keys. If you press Pause then o then o you get °. Pause then 1 then 2 gives you ½. Pause then a then " gives you ä. You get the idea.
Curiosity pushed me to try Linux roughly 15 years ago. Today it’s simply the best option for me. But I approach it as a user, I don’t posses any deep knowledge about how it works.
I’ve been running Linux in some form since 2012 - I installed Ubuntu 12 on my old laptop and played around with it - was a pain so I dropped it for Windows until like… 2015? Then I went full into it as I started getting into programming and whatnot.
Curiosity. Then starting development and figuring out most things non-MS specific assume UNIX/Linux based. I’m not obsessed at all, I quite enjoy macOS, and don’t mind Windows too much for what I do with it, but it’s my OS of choice for development machines, and any servers I control.
Same here. Curiosity which changed in time to my work.
I even was using win10 + wsl in company, but after time of adding crapware + forced win11 update (downgrade) I just said “gimme Linux laptop”. Gave up totally, useless for me
On personal hardware - Linux is first choice, omly gaming pc is Windows based.
It is the same as with all logins: It goes through the Pluggable Authentication Modules. So you need a service that uses PAM (they basically all do for a long time now) and the configuration of that service needs to include homed as an option to authenticate users. Check /etc/pam.d for the config files.
I tried it out and discovered none of the annoyances I had with windows existed here, then I started customizing things, redesigning my interface from the ground up to make everything as optimized as possible, to an extent that would never be possible on windows.
Plus I have massive ethical concerns regarding proprietary software.
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