Luna

I’ve seen that blog post. Tbh Vaxry is kinda unhinged. I think he cares about Cosmic being written in Rust more than the “rust cultists” themselves :P

Gnome. I actually started with KDE. It’s a good DE, but it’s got so many options that I had choice fatigue. I constantly tweaked my taskbar instead of focusing on what I wanted to do. And it was easy to get it to a “looks broken” state

When I tried Gnome, I fell in love with it. I love the unique workflow, lack of distractions, the modern adwaita design, etc. Everything felt so polished

That being said, I don’t like how Gnome devs seemingly can’t agree on anything with other desktop environments. And I don’t like how they refuse to support server-side window decorations. Like, I agree with them that CSD are better than SSD, but it would be reasonable to support SSD for toolkits that haven’t/don’t want to implement CSD themselves, right?

I’m excited for Cosmic. It looks like it combines the best of Gnome and KDE, and the devs don’t have the “my way or the highway” mindset

~/projects for things I made

~/git for things other people made

Not really surprising considering that (IIRC) it’s the default on the Gnome variants of Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora

But keep in mind that voluntary data tends to be pretty skewed

I would add:

cheat - a tool that lets you make and use your own cheatsheets

gomi - replacement for the rm command that has a trashcan, so if you accidentally delete something important you can just restore it

bat - modern cat, with features like syntax highlighting, line numbers, etc

eza - modern ls, with cool features like file icons

broot - a different than ranger/lf approach to navigating folders

mdr - a markdown viewer

Also, I think you should add a note that ranger should be installed from git because most distros package version 1.9.3 and that is 4 year out of date and has lots of bugs that have been fixed in the git master branch

NixOS. There are lots of great things about it (like atomic upgrades, easy rollbacks, no dependency hell, safely mixing stable and unstable packages, and more) but it’s killer feature is that (almost) everything about the system is specified in a single config file

Helix

I'd describe it as "NeoVim for people who don't want to spend time configuring it". It has syntax highlighting (for pretty much any language you can think of) and LSP support out of the box. And the config file is just a TOML file. Here's my current config for example:

theme = "monokai_pro_spectrum"

[editor]
line-number = "relative"
middle-click-paste = false

[editor.statusline]
mode.normal = "NORMAL"
mode.insert = "INSERT"
mode.select = "SELECT"

That's it. No need to deal with Lua or VimScript

Also using commands after typing the : is easier than in NeoVim since Helix will show you a list of available commands and a description of the closest match (or the one you choose from the list with the tab key). It looks like this:

I use Helix for quickly editing files and coding

Yeah, my mom didn’t have issues with that, but she did have issues with other almost as basic stuff

Yeah, but when I tried to get my mom to use Linux, she kept asking me how to do some things like moving a file, printing a PDF, saving a document in Libreoffice (even though she had no trouble doing it on Windows also with Libreoffice) etc. I’ve set up everything to be as seamless and close to Windows as possible but she still always had trouble doing something so I gave up, and reinstalled Windows. Ig my mom is just less tech savy than your family ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Mostly yeah

I think the reason is that 1. Linux is still too hard for the average person and 2. The average person just doesn’t care

Yes, you don’t have to write bash scripts or compile the kernel yourself, but still, Linux is different in many ways from Windows. This is on top of the fact that most people don’t know much about tech in general and often have problems with (imo) very basic stuff. I honestly can’t imagine them downloading an ISO file, flashing it onto an USB stick and then booting from it. Most people probably don’t even know that Windows != PC

Then there’s also the fact that the average person just doesn’t care. They just want to get things done

(sidenote: I might sound elitist but I’m not. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect everyone to be interested in tech, just like it’s not reasonable to, for example, expect everyone to be interested in cars. It just so happens that the tech industry is tightly connected to freedom, privacy, etc. while the car industry is not)