I use arch linux, I think arch
is ideal as it has just the right amount of pre-installed
software to make it usable on top of which you can create
your own system, I also think as a rolling release
distribution it's by far the easiest to use (and probably
also the most secure). Aside from that the greatest win
for arch linux is it's documentation, it's by far the best
documented distribution out there.
I used to use ubuntu back when I was a little scaredy-cat
and had things break all the time because some software
required an old version of some other software, this
doesn't happen with arch as everything is always the lates
version 👾 (note also that ubuntu uses snaps which I think
is the most silly invention ever).
I also tried installing gentoo on an old machine, it broke
as I compiled the kernel wrong 🙀, then I got it working
but I got frustrated having to wait ages for everything to
compile. Some people might like it as it's really minimal
and you learn a lot (I learned a lot by doing it, I hated
setting up the wifi though) but as I don't like the
waiting and feel comfortable in my habitat I won't be
switching.I guess if you really want to compile your
kernel yourself you can also quite easily do that on arch,
maybe I should try that sometime. I also wanted to say
that I respect people who use full FOSS systems, like
thinkpads with custom wifi card and parabola installed but
I personally don't want to buy a raspberry pi with a chip
flasher just for that.
I'm absolutely allergic to anything that isn't FOSS especially microsoft windows, from unixsheikh.com (based site): "Besides from collaborating with NSA Microsoft Windows should not be run on any computer for several reasons."
As a graphical user interface I use bspwm in combination with sxhkd on Xorg (I know wayland this and wayland that but X works fine so no).
On my main pc I used to use libnotify for this, as discribed in the arch wiki. Recently however I discovered the xfce4-notifyd program which is fairly light-weight and (I think) looks really good, so I switched to that. On my thinkpad however I find dunst more fitting.
xfce4-terminal, I see the appeal for st but for the moment I'm too lazy to configure something like that to my liking and don't even need it as xfce4-term does everything that I want it to do: it interfaces with picom to get blur and transparent background and it's not slow.
I have polybar installed on my laptops as it's useful to see the battery percentage
I just use MesloGS NF regular, but I also have noto-fonts-emoji installed to be able to see all the emojis like this one: 🥐.
vim, with "text editing" I basically mean all files. E.g C++, python, sh,.. Now I didn't install vim haha I installed gvim or graphical vim, now you might think omg what a loser but this was just to get the copy to + register commands working without having to compile vim myself, I of course never open gvim. As a vim plugin manager I use vim-plug.
gnuplot and if very complicated python
ncmpcpp with mpd as backend, I also use yt-dlp to download songs from youtube,soundcloud,.. if I can't find a torrent. I then use a script to tag the song correctly and picard to get the cover art (or add it myself)
I use chromium with the following extensions: privacy badger, ublock origin and vimium. I used to use min, which is a fine browser, but I stepped off it as it's built on electron. Analogous story with qutebrowser, which would be the perfect browser, were it not written in python and thus making it very slow.
To browse my documents I use lf with a custom configuration file which you can find in my configs repository.
If there isn't a program for it on it's own, you can propably write a combination of programs in a shell script for it, so that's what I do. See my Scripts repository.