wwwgem

wwwgem, 1 year ago (edited 4 months ago)

Don’t know if you plan to use another Arch-based distro on this laptop in the future but I came across this page which has some tips to adjust the Framework 13 including one that may be related to what you mention. They recommend to use 1,5 scaling factor. More details can be found here.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

Thank you for taking time to share this detailed feedback. Very useful!

wwwgem, 1 year ago

Thanks. That does not not really address my question but I certainly share your view as to not be married to a brand. My personal history and this post question are actually going that route.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

Wow that’s quite impressive. Serious customer service definitely.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

Thanks for the feedback.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

Wonderful to hear! Thanks for bringing one more vote to Framework :)

wwwgem, 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing this feedback. One more point for Framework :)

wwwgem, 1 year ago (edited 4 months ago)

Influence is a curse in today’s world. I’ve made this final selection of brands based on personal choice and for reasons exposed in this post. But it’s all personal so you may disagree with some/all candidates and that’s perfectly fine. I’ve posted here to actually collect as much opinions as possible so thanks for sharing yours.

Companies always find a way to justify for higher price to sell you not that good hardware or to overprice their stuff for non sense reasons. As anyone else (except fan boys of any given brand) I’m running away from that. In my personal views, companies on this list have reasonable offers considering their history, clients pool, philosophy…

Framework is maybe the best deal here because it has good price and all parts of their machines are replaceable. And again, prices for the parts are fair. So in the long run, users may be winners if the company doesn’t crash. If it does then it won’t be worth than having bought from another company. With all the options to build the laptop you want for your needs it really make me feel like customizing my Linux system but from a hardware standpoint. It’s a big plus for me to pay only for what I want/need and with them you can go even further by physically positioning your ports on the fly. That’s an unseen degree of freedom and it has real world applications.

wwwgem, 1 year ago (edited 5 months ago)

We’re exactly on the same page: “the tool is not the goal”. The only difference may be that I see chosing options for an app as options for a tool. If I want to cut wood or metal I need a different saw. Even though the tool is basically the same it doesn’t serve the same purpose. Hence I configure options once and for all, like I would consider which hardware I need exactly in terms of use, ergonomic, power… before buying it.
I don’t spend time tweaking the look of a tool because it’s doesn’t fit my approach of things anymore. As such I don’t even use a DE. But I feel the need to build the right tool (i.e. system app) I need to perform a job as efficiently as possible while keeping the tool itself minimalist and as invisible as possible. On my daily use I have tools that I couldn’t live without anymore but if you ask me a list I will either forgot them or put them at the bottom because I will not think about them right away since they became a second nature.

I certainly see the comfort of the out of the box approach and it can serve a lot of people. In my use case I just realize that - using the example above - it could be like using a wood saw on metal in some cases. It may work but not as good as you would expect to have the job done properly. Also, the fit them all approach means building an app with tons of options activated and I prefer to have available to me only the options I really need. The philosophy feels less bloated to me and I’m not overloading my system with stuff I’ll never use. It’s more time consuming at first to chose the right app but with time it became quick enough and it definitely save me way more time in the long run when I use my system.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

It’s not user friendly at first and that’s certainly why it doesn’t get the love it deserved. But once you figure it out, you can build the launcher you want and never have to go back to the config anymore.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

Have you looked at KISS? Extremely lightweight and customizable. You can go from the most minimalist approach with text only and selection of apps to show to crash things like visual effects and icons for every single installed app.

wwwgem, 1 year ago (edited 5 months ago)

Thanks for this feedback, it helps me feel a little bit less stupid :) With everything setup in NixOS documentation for neovim in appearance I thought really dumb to not be able to have it worked.

Using the approach proposed by @flashgnash (i.e. using lazy.vim) let me install neovim and all my plugins.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

OP has solved his issue already but the trick I mentioned could be due to a capacitor issue which can occur anytime and break things that worked before.
I was just trying to help by suggesting an approach that solved the exact same issue on others’ laptop running the same distro. Even though not convenient you can either wait for your battery to run out or disconnect it to try this trick.

wwwgem, 1 year ago (edited 5 months ago)

@dream_weasel Did that help?

wwwgem, 1 year ago

When Wayland is eventually ready, I will personaly look into river. At least that’s what I would do now but no doubts that by the time everybody move to Wayland there will be way more options to consider. Hopefully one will be a good replacement for bspwm.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

I used dwm for few years before moving to bspwm.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

Due to the still early development of NixOS, Home manager is in some ways very similar to nix-env and flakes is still highly experimental. Also, the configuration parameters are changing quite significantly with the distro development. I’m sure this will all settle down when the distro will become more mature but to be honest that’s also what attracts me. I like chaos ^^ Seriously, this shows me some potential for great achievements. I will continue testing NixOS but for now I didn’t find THE reason to leave Arch yet. If I would have to deploy my config on several machines or create dedicated config using a common base then I would have been convinced. Will see where my journey leads me.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

That’s indeed pretty neat.

wwwgem, 1 year ago (edited 7 months ago)

Right, I totally agree. If I would have to deploy my config on several machines or create dedicated config using a common base then I would have been convinced. I’m still not convinced from a dummy single user point of view but I still believe in this distro and like its approach so I’ll continue experimenting with it and we’ll see where my journey leads me.

At least for now I’m glad to have a new toy I can mess up with. With my Arch system I was getting this weird feeling where I was happy to have an efficient and stable machine while at the same time being bored to have nothing to test/tweak/destroy and rebuild. I mean I love to learn and discover new things so I experiment a bunch of applications and parameters I will never need anyway but it becomes harder and harder to find something that keeps me entertained for more than a day.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

If you’re using only one monitor, simply duplicate and scale your laptop screen instead of using the extended approach.
To give you a rough idea, this will look to something like this:
xrandr --output eDP1 --mode 1366x768 --scale 1x1 --output HDMI1 --same-as eDP1 --mode 1920x1080 --scale 0.711x0.711
Use xrandr to find the monitors names and resolution. The scale option is simply the ratio between your 2 resolutions.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

My statement about the lack of uniformity was in regards to several issues I had with some plugins in emacs. Even my friend who codes his own plugins for emacs was of no help because 1) there is too many approaches and dependencies to write plugins, 2) there was no solution. Also, there are too many plugins to serve the same purpose and I found it difficult (compared to neovim) to figure out the difference between them. At least twice I also experienced conflicts between plugins. Finally, the level of customization was also less granular than what offers neovim. Again, I can see why emacs is appealing to some. It’s just not for me. As I like to say, the number of options available in the Linux world is one of the most beautiful things that makes this OS the only one you can tweak perfectly to any user’s needs and preference.

I would add that neovim and emacs both have a steep learning curve but I personaly found the level of support and core and plugins documentation for neovim more accessible, readable, and better organized.

I completely share your vision about what an IDE should be doing. I’m old school and adhere to the “do one thing but do it right” philosophy. Also, I hate relying on one tool for several needs because if anything goes wrong it has multiple impacts. As a side note, I use neomutt as my email client and you can nicely couple neovim to it to write your emails ;)

wwwgem, 1 year ago

I’ve often heard Emacs users pose the argument that Emacs as an Elisp interpreter does just one thing. It’s just that this single thing allows the myriad of functionality it offers. So in that sense comparing it to a terminal/console seems more apt than comparing it to a text editor. I wonder what you think of that argument.

I only used emacs for a year so I may be wrong but speaking only about how I used it and my current workflow I don’t see a difference. Looking at the usage (and not the code), my very first impression of emacs was that it’s acting as a terminal multiplexer which I was used to and so I liked this aspect. Anytime you need to do something that goes beyond the tasks of an IDE (calendar, email…) you switch window/panel (I’ve always been confused with the specific emacs terminology). That’s exactly what I’m doing with Tmux where I run neovim and call other apps with a single keybinding. Then I can freely switch from one to another, close one, recall it in the state I’ve closed it…
Again, this is related to the philosophies of emacs and neovim (i.e. do-it-all or do one thing). While neovim is “only” an IDE, emacs goes beyond, and for me this is not a negative criticism of either app. You build a tool with the coding language you need to implement some functionalities. In that sense, to compare apple to apple, emacs has to be compared to neovim coupled to a terminal multiplexer.

Hehe, that’s cool! Currently I’m really happy with Thunderbird so I don’t expect to move away anytime soon, but I’ll keep it in mind.

I used Thunderbird as well and did the switch mainly to allow me to achieve the workflow described above. I do most of my tasks in the terminal. Neomutt would certainly be one additional layer of complexity in your transition to an IDE, unless you chose to use emacs for your emails. Actually configuring emacs as an email client or going with neomutt is pretty similar. But at the end - and this is an example of the higher level of granularity I mentioned earlier - neomutt is more customizable.
Talking about the level of customization of the IDE functionality only, the plugins I use offer more configuration options in neovim as well.

Orgmode is also one (the?) big star player in emacs and neovim is trying to attract some users by developing a similar thing here or there but this is not something that would benefit to my workflow. This is maybe one of the reason why people choose emacs vs neovim and why I could quit emacs easily. Going back to the coding language, you can see that the use of lua opens new doors to the original vim. What I appreciate though is that you don’t have to implement any features if you don’t use them in neovim so I can keep my system limited to my needs. This is also seen as a bad thing by some when you start because emacs is capable of quite a lot with a fresh installation while neovim can barely open itself ;)

Overall we’re all sharing personal experience so no generalization should be extrapolated from single visions and I’m aware of my own bias and preference for singl- task, lightweight, fast tool.

wwwgem, 1 year ago

Thanks for the information. I’m always happy to hear from others because that’s how I make progress. Also with my workflow in constant evolution it’s good to know neovim’s limitations so I can be prepared. Being curious by nature I will try other apps with no doubts anyway. I’ve tried vi, neovim, emacs, but only heard of VS so who knows…

wwwgem, 1 year ago

It’s always difficult to find a good starting point but remember that you’re not married to your apps so you can easily switch from one to another and maybe come back later. Over the years, I’ve seen most of Linux users going that route because 1) it’s fun and you learn a little bit from each experience, 2) Linux users are generally curious, 3) some apps may be more suitable to your workflow at a given time but your workflow may change over time, 4) Linux offers us so many options so it’s like unleashing kids in a toys store, you want to try everything :)

wwwgem, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Dive in beyond the basic “hjkl:q” though.

This is a video I can’t recommend enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8XtNXutVtoIt’s long (>1h) but it’s very well made.

It’s a long tutor go through with some bonus advanced tweak, and the explanations clearly helps remembering everything easily. If I knew it when I’ve started that would have saved me so much time and helped me from getting into bad habits I then had to fight against.