I used to be constantly making tweaks to stuff and distrohopping like none other, but in 2018 I finally found THE setup and settled down. These days it’s all about having scripts that set things up exactly how I want them.
About 90% of what I know about ssh, terminal multiplexing, scripting, and diagnostic programs grew from an optimization project.
I had a vague desire to build a one-stop dashboard where I could monitor, update, and control a half-dozen linux computers at once. It was just for fun, but it kept me reading through the manpages for weeks.
That’s the beauty of Linux! If you feel adventurous, you always easily find something to tweak/experiment. Since I moved to Linux my mindset and workflow never ceased to evolve. That’s because I’m curious but that couldn’t be possible in any other OS. Only Linux can offer so much options and an exceptional level of granularity so anyone can build his/herown perfect system. We may achieve the same thing but in different ways and we’ll both run Linux.
If you’re more shy you can simply install a set of software under a given distro and you’re done. This is also a Linux option. Right now, I couldn’t find any challenges to keep me busy for more than a day or two until I decided to test a new system (NixOS) in a virtual machine. This is another way to have the kind of fun you mention :)
I love tweaking and improving my system so much that I dedicated my little blog only to that. Sharing is another crucial principles I love in the Linux philosophy.
I used to spend an unhealthy amount of hours customizing my desktop (Plasma) just to distrohop and repeat that cycle one million times. Then I just got used to the vanilla state of Plasma, and now I really don’t care about that at all.
Kind of, but it’s from my FreeBSD days. It was early 2000s, and at that point I’d been using it since version 3.3, and I was toying with 4.4, and I was getting into kernel optimization. I started removing the things I didn’t need.
A lot of it was simple, such as firewire support, etc. Then I came to the section about peripherals. “AT keyboard? Yup, that’s going”
Welp, turns out PS/2 keyboards were built on top of the AT keyboard subsystem. Luckily I could SSH into it and revert the change.
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