𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Or maintain a repos. Which would force people to create an account on one of the free VCS servers, pay for an account on a non-free one, or run their own.

Every day?

• Herbstluftwm, the window manager. I used i3 for a decade, then bspwm for a few months, then landed on hlwm which I’ve been happily using for over a year. I don’t foresee changing until I’m forced to switch to Wayland. I’ve used almost every window manager and DE available for Linux and Solaris. Hlwm has things I can no longer live without:
  • It’s entirely configuration-file-less, which means the CLI client is the first class citizen for C&C.
  • It’s tiled and keyboard controllable is, again, a first-class citizen
  • It has a sane tree model, with no weird exceptions
  • It’s stable
  • It’s fast and small. You never see it in top, sorting either by CPU or memory
• Zsh, the shell, in which I run 90% of my applications (the regular exceptions being the Luakit browser and Factorio, the game. everything else is CLI or a TUI). Zsh is bash backwards compatible, and it has a bunch of extra convenience syntax that makes scripting more powerful, pushing out the border where switching to a real programming language is necessary. I have lived in sh, bash, and csh over my life, and I’ve tried fish and a number of others; the rich data model for process communication is compelling, but I’ve always discovered it lacking, so on zsh I remain.
• Tmux, the terminal multiplexer, which is (almost) invariably the first child of every terminal (rio -e 'tmux attach -t#'). Because terminals crash, because it survives session restarts, because it lets me log in remotely and continue what I started in my desktop, and because it works over ssh and having a consistent multiplexer environment across machines is nice. I used sceen for years before discovering tmux, and have tried almost every other terminal multiplexer; and none add any significant value for me over tmux.
• Helix, the editor in which I spend most of my time. Because I started with emacs and used it for years before switching to vim. Then I used vim for decades before switching to Kakoune. Then I used Kakoune for about 2 years before switching to helix. Kakoune was too much like Emacs for my taste: heavy on chording, light on modality. Helix is much more like vim: lighter on chording, more mode-driven. Chording aggravates my carpel tunnel, and I’m more comfortable in modal editors. I switched from vim because the plugins necessary to be a competent development environment got insane, and my vim was starting to take as long to start up as emacs, which was unacceptable. Also, LSP integration was super flaky and broke every six months; it’s what initially drove me to Kakoune.

I’m currently using Rio as my terminal. It has bugs, but it’s actively developed and regularly releases will fix one more thing. It has both ligature and sixel support, and it’s wildly fast and far, far less memory intensive than either kitty or ghostty, which are both pretty fat. I am not including it in “the list” because some remaining bugs are pretty big, like randomly crashing when it gets resized or sees some sequence of asci escape codes. It’s not much of an issue because I run everything in tmux, and it crashes less with every release, but I hesitate to recommend it until it’s more stable.

Mint eschews all of the Snap crap, though, doesn’t it?

Jesus, please tell me it does. I’ve been recommending it to beginners. I thought it was sanitized.

Void is rolling release IIRC

That’s what I thought, but the main website says Void focuses on stability over being cutting edge, which would imply some sort of release cycle. Or, maybe they just update packages less frequently.

I still hold Debian in higher regard since it’s slightly easier for a novice to get used to

It’s hard to beat Mint as a novice distro, for sure.

(I’m replying to you twice b/c totally different topics)

Tell me more about your Void experience. I’ve been meaning to give it a shot, except I don’t get as much enjoyment out of fussing with distros as I used to. What are the pain points? Under Artix, I used dinit which I really liked, but I tried s6 first and absolutely hated it. I didn’t try runit; how is it?

What I’m most interested in is xbps, because IMO it’s the package manager that makes or breaks a system. I’m quite fond of pacman and have encountered far fewer dependency hell situations than I did with either rpm or deb, and rolling release is a must. xbps looks kind of like a rolling stable release?

I have to put in a plug for herbstluftwm.

It really depends on whether you like the keyboard and tiling widow managers, or if you like dragging windows around and resizing them. Tiling widow managers are popular, but they’re definitely a taste.

hlwm and bspwm are a - “configurationless” breed - I think river on Wayland is the same. This has become my one requirement for a window manager. Every configuration is done through a command line client call, and it’s game changing. The “configuration” is just a specific shell script hlwm runs when it starts up, and it’s full of whatever client calls needed to configure the system. Every call in that script can be run outside the script; it’s literally a just shell script. I run all sorts of things in that script: launching “desktoppy” programs like kanata, setx, autostart programs that start on a specific screen; one script lays out one screen in a complex 2x1 layout where each pane is tabbed and contains three terminals each, and then launches terminals that connect to various remote computers - that’s my “remote server” screen, and it’s all set up when I log in.

However - definitely for tiling enthusiasts. I used i3 for a decade before I found bspwm, which converted me to configurationless WMs, and I ended up with hlwm. It’s honestly what’s preventing me from giving Wayland a serious go, although river might do the trick.