A story telling to save me from a therapist consultation.
No space square world. I realize that that this could be my theme philosophy. This is my general approach:
- windows manager: tiling (bspwm)with no spaces, squared windows, no decorations, no visual effects
- theme: transparency and grey background buttons/white text
Over two decades I went from a fancy looking machine to its complete opposite where minimalism is king. How did I make such a big jump?
To make it brief, recreating this comfort look that invaded my real environment felt reassuring at first in my virtual life. But as time went by I noticed that smooth rounded stuff that transiently showed up on my screen created:
- more and more distraction and negatively impacted my productivity
- some frustration when something didn’t run as expected because I felt that everything should be as smooth as the appearance of my screen
I would definitely say that I feel way better now and I’m more efficient but I also admit that I’ve reached an extreme where:
- I don’t appreciate screens over 14" anymore because I feel like it’s taxing on my eyes movement and again a waste of space
- I don’t like wasting a pixel of space if not justified. This is also maybe influenced by preference for small screens
- I need extreme simplicity (which brings efficiency) to all aspects of my workflow. So I use a 36-key split keyboard, a trackball, vim-like keybindings everywhere possible, use terminal as much as I can, use fzf for all my file searches…
Hope you will never end up like me but nice to have friends in this group if it’s too late for you ^^
Simplicity and organization can be very Zen, my friend.
Perhaps instead of judging yourself so harshly, you consider that others may see the positives of simplicity and small-scale as well.
Not everybody needs big and flashy. Utilitarian isn’t a bad thing. Utilitarian simplicity can be its own art form.
You’re right.
Hi … so … Um wanna be friends? whats your favorite font?
Source Code Pro for writing and Nerd for symbols.
Solid choice, I use Fira code with nerd for symbols.
Iosevka
I love finding other fonts with Code glyphs. It looks like it would look cool on a terminal. I use fira code.
Fira is my #2, but iosevka makes the terminal feel like home.
Both iosevka and fira look nice.
I get that, some just call you.
If your setup allows you to be a productive member of society, you’re golden mental health wise. /s
You may want to get your eyes checked if watching HD video on a tiny screen seems preferable unless all your content fits your displays native resolution; I am fairly certain my eyes are terrible. Maybe that’s why I love that dark themes are becoming more popular.
Transparency is nice, but Windows Vista is partially what converted me to Linux. I dislike rounded corners too, since content is always rectangular.
I don’t know why no mainstream desktop OS really has a good mouse driven tiling setup out of the box. I have a dual screen setup, so I mostly just full screen apps and alt tab if needed which reduces distraction. If I’m trying to focus on a single thing, the second screen gets turned off.
I find myself becoming more minimalist over time as well. Society seems to be more distraction driven by the day, so having an OS that stays out of the way is a boon.
Looks like the group is eventually not that small.
When I’m in a GUI, I like the Win95 UI paradigm. That’s one of the few good things that came out of Microsoft: I like the classic Windows look-and-feel. That’s why I run Mint / Cinnamon. I’ve tried minimalistic tiling window managers and I can’t stand them.
However - and that’s the weird thing - most of what I do in Cinnamon is open terminals with tmux that I… tile. And within one tmux pane or window, there’s a very good chance I’ll run vim with several files edited in split screens 🙂
I spend 75% of my time working in a terminal - sometimes in a real Linux console, but most of the time in a Cinnamon terminal. And I’ll do the minimalistic thing within the terminal because that’s how I’ve been rolling since the early eighties and it’s just how my workflow is most efficient. But I really like the Windows-like graphical environment around the terminals. Call me weird…
One would say you’re more weird than me then. That makes me feel better ^^
I’m gonna come clean: I used awesome wm for years, never touched the configuration once 😹. Now I do the same with gnome
Do you use a dock or bar? I find it hard to justify it these days. It tells me the time, thats about it.
That’s another thing I’ve changed as well. No bar or dock anymore. I use rofi and some home made scripts to:
- show the date/time, disk space, free ram, bluetooth devices battery level, volume, and search bar (to launch a command or a search on internet)
- manage the volume sinks and sources
- manage the wifi and vpn
- manage my passwords and automatically fill forms if I ask for it
- manage my internet bookmarks
- search my email contacts
- manage the clipboard
The whole WM landscape of Linux was a big turn off for me. I had used CDE on Solaris before and never really thought about choosing or customizing my DE. That was one of the big reasons I ended up loving OSX (no choice of WM and very few customization options, along with globally consistent hotkeys) and ended up using that as my primary GUI Unix environment, along with headless Linux for most of the last ~20 years.
Right. Actually one of the things I love about Linux is that it offers so many options so you can make your own combination to create the perfect system for your specific needs.
You can get all the visual distractions out of your way and tweak litterally everything to an incredible granular level. No other OS can pretend to be so user focused while staying so simple in appearance. You’re not adapting to your system, it’s built for you.The problem I have with customization options is that I don’t want to customize it, and when I go looking for a setting to change, I don’t want to be drowning in options that I’ll never use. The way I always thought about it is when I buy a saw or a hammer, I go straight to using it. I don’t customize my saw or hammer. That’s not why I buy them. I buy them to build things with them. The tool is not the end goal. Similarly, the DE is not the end goal. I want to spend time getting work done, not spend time customizing my environment.
Recently though I’ve been looking around again a little bit, looking for a DE that has what I want out of the box. LXDE seems closest so far.
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.
@friend_of_satan @wwwgem That got to me too the more I used Linux. BSD (OpenBSD specifically) clicked much more for me. Not that it’s any less customisable, but the BSD culture tends towards favouring defaults and refining existing software rather than limitless configuration and novelty. I’ve generalised here but I do have this kind of feeling.
I can see that. I’ve tried OpenBSD before Linux as well. One of the reasons I feel good using Linux is that you can go as crazy or as minimalist as you want. And all along this spectrum you can choose the same level of options but the way you chose them will make you build the system you want for your own needs and liking. As long as the options exist but are not installed or activated by default, I like having the choice (which also means the choice to not use them). It also help me build a consistent system where all my tools can freely interact together (and again the way I want to).
I don’t want to have to comply to the way a developer decided I should use something.
At the end of the day we’re lucky to have the choice in the OS that fits us the best. And most importantly we can evolve and make a switch if we ever feel the need for it :D Like distro in Linux I find it stupid to claim that one OS is best that another. I hope this post didn’t give that impression. What’s best is what’s meet your needs.
@wwwgem Totally agree! :) One of the coolest things about Linux for me is learning about all the different approaches to systems and applications.
I am mostly a windows user these days, but fifteen years ago I ran Linux as my main OS.
I ran Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude E5400, at first I ran Gnome 2 or KDE 4 as my DE, but got annoyed with how much vertical space they used, so I learned how to use Fluxbox.
Fluxbox is great, a small stacking WM, that is easy to configure and worked like I wanted it.
I still set it up to run gnome-settings-daemon as I had no idea on how to do apply a GTK theme without it.
The really annoying part of running fluxbox as a WM was that I never figured out how to shut down the computer from a menu, it allways complained about me not having permissions to shut down the computer, so I used to do a log off and before the GDM login screen loaded I could press the power button on the laptop and have it shutdown the computer gracefully, timing was key, but it worked.
