Jesus they really do have to ruin every last thing don’t they.

To be clear I mean the current American administration and American tech oligarchs. Fuck them all.

https://red.artemislena.eu/r/technology/comments/1bjuhbb/reddit_ceo_steve_huffman_defends_his_193_million/kvu0h3q/

Yep. Use it every day. It’s awesome.

Linux>Windows10>Windows11

Morons…so many morons in power…dear fucking god.

Most applications can do just fine with SQLite, but if you need something with a lot more write speed, go with PostgreSQL.

God this tweet makes me mad on so many levels. Anyone who has spent any meaningful amount of time in the command line knows this tweet is such bullshit.

EDIT: Further venting of frustrations.

Can you provide a link? I just see what appears to be a standard game console controller with a touchpad? Maybe I’m not looking at the right device…

This might be a controversial opinion, but I would stick with the QWERTY layout. There’s already a lot of cognitive overhead learning things like tiling window managers and Vim key bindings that I don’t think that switching up the keyboard layout is really worth it. What affects typing speed most, imho, is muscle memory, speed of thought, and lastly finger reach. Ortholinear keyboards help a lot with that last aspect, and there’s differing opinions on what is best.

I think a good place to start is learning to use the Preionic 60% or the Plank 40%. Keep the QWERTY layout, but memorize how to access symbols (and on the 40% numbers) using the additional layer keys.

You can think of layer keys like extra shift keys near the space bar that change not just to capital letters, but also numbers and symbols, that’s why you can get away with significantly less keys on the keyboard, and gain much faster reach of your fingers once you memorize these other layouts.

The order I would go is:

1. Learn Vim/Vimium on a regular keyboard. Learn how to use the terminal to do as many everyday tasks as you can.

2. Customize and learn to use a tiling window manager on a regular keyboard.

3. Buy, build, and learn to use an ortholinear keyboard with the tiling window manager.

After you’re comfortable with that, you can consider installing the different layouts like COLEMAK onto your ortho and try that out. But honestly I don’t think this last step is necessary. Instead I’d start to look at other ortho keyboards you might like more than the preionic or plank.

I now use the ZSA Voyager. My friend enjoys using a custom ortho with a curved surface for ergonomics. And there are typing devices called DataHands that basically completely upend the way one thinks about typing. Its a whole world. Good luck.

I have done a lot to make my environment nearly 100% mouseless. The only exception is gaming. You just need a mouse for most modern gaming.

That said, it requires a large amount of personal customization. If you edit files/code, look into Vim/Neovim. Heck, just learn Vim Key bindings. Sorry, not sorry, it’s worth it.

Install vimium in your browser so you don’t have to use a mouse nearly at all while browsing the internet. Learn how to use it.

IMHO a tiling window manager is a must if you want to make your setup as keyboard centric as possible. i3 is a good starter. I currently use BSPWM, but there’s quite a few to choose from, and they all are roughly the same once you have your keyboard shortcuts in place. Make sure to combine it with an application launcher like dmenu or rofi. If you need a status bar like i3bar, use one (I personally go without).

Get very very familiar with the terminal. You’ll know you’re down the rabbit hole far enough when you can connect and troubleshoot a WiFi/Ethernet connection without using the mouse. Imho, you don’t really need a file manager, though it’s nice to have. I do have one on hand just in case, but just a terminal and the good ol’ ls command is good enough for me.

Also look into ortholinear keyboards (acronym is OLKB) if you truly want to fly. Pricy investment, but your hands will thank you later, and once you are comfortable with that, the combination of an OLKB with a tiling window manager WILL make you fast.

I became obsessed with foregoing the mouse from 99% of my day to day use of my computer a couple of years ago and it is very very satisfying. Learning curve is high. But IMHO totally worth it.

Yep. Sadly it doesn’t work with Mullvad on.

Yes, but only with oldreddit, not with the now defunct teddit instances.

A lot.

Desktop/Laptop

• Artix Linux
• Neovim
• BSPWM
• Suckless Terminal
• Librewolf
• Firefox
• Ungoogled Chromium
• Thunderbird
• mpv
• rtorrent
• Keepassxc
• btop (TUI resource monitor)
• links (old school TUI browser)
• newsboat (TUI RSS reader)
• yt-dlp
• git
• Espanso (text expander)
• GIMP
• Inkscape
• Krita
• Calibre (for epubs, great with Kobo ereader)
• Wireshark
• Lutris/WINE/Proton
• OBS

Phone

• Android/GrapheneOS
• Heliboard
• FUTO Voice (Speech to Text)
• Mull
• Vanadium
• Various Fossify Apps
• Keepassxc
• Thunder
• Tusky
• Thunderbird
• Tubular
• Seal (yt-dlp wrapper)
• mpv
• Antennapod
• Feeder (RSS reader)
• Glider (HN client)
• OSMand
• Stealth (Reddit lurking)
• Element (Matrix client)
• Transistor
• Translate You
• Protonmail
• Proton Drive
• Breezy Weather
• URLCheck
• Wikipedia (official reader)

Thanks. That Heliboard comment sent me down a rabbit hole. I don’t really use glide typing, but in case any one’s curious: scroll a bit down under this section on Heliboard’s Github and you’ll find the instructions on how to install the proprietary library. You’ll also find a link shortly thereafter that leads you to the repo where you can download the needed library.

Neat little feature I wasn’t aware was available for Heliboard. Cheers.

This kind of happened with the xz hack already. I didn’t look into it heavily, so this is anecdotal, but accordingly the xz hack relied on systemd to execute the backdoor, so if you didn’t have systemd on your machine, the backdoor was essentially inert.

I use the AUR all the time, the only thing I have to do is look for systemd as a dependency and avoid that.

The Artix team generally provides init scripts for commonly used packages that rely on init. So for example, if you want to install openvpn, you’d have to install it alongside its script so:

sudo pacman -S openvpn openvpn-runit

Installs the runit init script. It does let you know that (for runit) to initialize it you have to create a soft link to the service directory so after installation:

sudo ln -s /etc/runit/sv/openvpn /run/runit/service/

And then initialize using runit’s service manager, sv:

sudo sv start openvpn

Anyways, that’s just one instance. I have only had one issue where I had to heavily troubleshoot for an obscure piece of software that relied on systemd as a dependency and there wasn’t any alternative…so I simply modified the source code, recompiled the binary and did it myself. But I’ve been using Artix for nearly 5 years and that is one out of thousands of packages.

Artix Linux. Basically Arch without systemd. It has four options for alternative init systems, so you get to see how it compared to systemd (ultimately it shows how a more minimal init approach is all you need in place of systemd, and where systemd has stepped outside of init into what should be part of the OS space, like elogind, etc.)

The Artix team have done an amazing job of writing various init scripts to keep the distro comparable with Arch, have written alternatives to systemd modules, like replacing elogind with their own implementation, seatd, and IMHO is the defacto standard for how you implement a non systemd distro.

Working without systemd, even if you like it from a sys admin standpoint, teaches you what you lose without systemd, which for the average user isn’t much. I game, code, administer web servers, etc., all without missing a beat on Artix Linux, and it honestly has taught me so much about Linux after I switched from Arch.

I would consider jumping to Gentoo or Void out of curiosity, but Artix is where I’ll be staying for the foreseeable future.

On Android, from FDroid you can install an app called Seal, which is a minimal frontend for yt-dlp. I discovered it while trying to circumvent issues Newpipe was having with some update to the YouTube API.

Unlike Newpipe forks, which can use the sponsor block API but not when downloading the video directly to your device, Seal allows you to input the custom flags available from the yt-dlp cli, so you can automatically skip annoying sponsor mentions even on your downloaded videos.

Cool blog. Good code.

Most instances had an outage yesterday I noticed. I’ll grant it’s not perfect, and thanks for clarifying, I had been using, but forgot to mention, redlib as a redirect.

Self hosting is obviously the best option if you can, I just use the instances personally and 99% of the time those links have just worked for me, but I can’t speak on other people’s experience with them.

I’m just glad there’s an alternative front end at all and there are those putting their instances out there.