It gets better!

I took a deep dive on fonts my first week(they were fuzzy). I now know a lot about things I almost never use or set, but every win will give you a piece of the whole thing.

Eventually you figure out the "core" (that stays the same everywhere and you don't have to do near as much work to tack on the extras.

It's big and complicated because you're replacing windows with the hundred individual things windows does, each were made by someone else, in some cases decades apart.

Somehow it all works pretty well, but we stand on the shoulders of some giants.

Edit: I also don't like manjaro, but someone here has covered why better than I would have. I run endeavouros and would recommend if you want arch with less config, but it is arch. Mint is where I have been pointing people to start recently.

It hooks into nearly every base utility I can't live without (fzf, jq, helix, ripgrep). If you're on windows im not sure you're going to get a ton unless you live in WSL.

You can pick the editor it'll open by default, which should be configurable with comparable syntax highlighting. Vi can pretty much look like whatever. I think it'll default to vscode on windows.

Im not sure what you'd use it for but manage files, but I would have poked it and probably moved along while I was still on windows.

Edit: the other benefit you might not see has a lot to do with support of mime types.

https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml

The xdg open protocol will open whatever app is assigned to handle type locally. Which is probably why it defaults to editor.

I binned my copies of ranger and nnn when I found this last year. Its stellar.

Diskonaut is the only other one that stuck, of the new CLI file managers. hunting lost files from a recovered hard drive was a lot easier with directory visualization for whatever reason.

I honestly bounced off of every window manager I haven't configured myself, so kudos if you're managing.

Fedora's spin of sway should more or less take drop in i3 configs if you can back them up and figure out the few things that don't directly translate. It was pretty solid last I looked.

With window managers you'll probably get more mileage tooling with the configs than switching distros. Aside from cosmic the lineage is largely as a command line app that shows you windows, rather than GUI first.

That's probably closer today than it was then. The added complication being that client is probably not thin enough for them to return to mainframe model which would be vastly easier to monetize.

Besides we got WSL out of the bargain, so at least inter op isn't a reverse engineering job. Its poetically the reason linux ended up killing the last few win sever shops I knew. Why bother running win sever x just to run apache under linux. Why bother with hyper v when you can pull a whole docker image.

If the fortune 500 execs are sold on microsoft ita mostly as a complicated contactual absolution of cyber security blame.

I know about 3 people on earth that ever ran it in anything approaching production. Two of them still found a way to use the acme editor til LSPs took over, one is still at it.

It remains a pretty cool project you can still find people maintaining the bones of it. I think the core utils are ported and in the arch repo.

I use the Debian social contract as an example of the an unmitigated good in open source.

That doesn't mean the org always live up to it, but that's partially why there are battles for things like representation inside. I wouldn't extend the benefit of the doubt to canonical, and I prefer rolling as opposed to security ported updates on my own hardware, but they made what you see possible on the internet in large part because people came together to make a free platform.

The orgs dogmas look like product of a bygone age to be, and changes to environment in software is probably as hostile to their approach as ever. I'm amazed they're not more dysfunctional just from the outside looking, it's a rock solid implementation.

This. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I tend to think you can secure yourself some of the gains without rooting your phone, but it's a lot of twiddling and an ecosystem swap.

I loathe apple, but if you're not ready to dive in, your home devices are where I would start. Routers, modems, home PCs, learn how to set up encryption and redirection to put things behind. Ditch your roomba.

Edit; I did not mean to talk down, sounds like your on that train. Android is linux and adb is awesome (sometimes).

Keepassdx/xc and syncthing have been awesome, rise up has a decent free VPN client for public use in fdroid.

I mean it predates a lot of the pervy anime, but Usenet looked the same at the start with lots of Unix/computer boards and an alt.

Computer enthusiasts gonna enthusiastically talk about computers. People who pick up and move to a new platform are likely to be united around being technically competent enough to get there first, and everything else second.

It has been years since I was paid to play on prod, bigger companies are smart enough to have change management.

I remember lots of messing with kerberos, and I don't remember a lot of minutes passing without cursing.

It's largely a tough nut to crack just because Microsoft is obnoxious about integration. Thunderbird can do it (or used to) in pieces with local AD forest access. I don't know about remote IMAP access, but you can definitely sneaker net export. It's the weird formatting on the import side I'm fighting.

I saw someone piping something to local programs through the office 365 electron app, but the least work probably ends run a VM and sync off of or just use that. I didn't try wine, so others would have to verify emulation works.

Thanks for the data points!

I'm working on trying to pry local office software copies of outlook from the clutched hands of people stuck in the win 7 era.

Well done sync is a hell of a drug.

Evolution is another GUI client I don't have a ton of experience with other than proofing it was stable. It exists.

Unironically the most powerful email clients i know on any platform are retro, mutt or emacs (last time I used notmuch, but there's options). I never bothered to set it up since all the reading and half the writing I do are off my phone these days.

But I don't know the juice is worth the squeeze starting out, that's a bit of a hurdle. I'm really curious on use case, what are you missing?

Definitely worth running through vim tutor at least once.

It's beyond typing speed, things like piping out strings to utilities is using one program to write another, you aren't just getting faster because of access, it's a paradigm shift.

Edit just for fun: im a non Dev dummy who happened to grow up in a Unix household. Even having dropped vim for helix and bounced around the MS admin/Apple IT space for 30+ years. When I switched to Linux I could still remember binds I'd set up and last used at 9.

Kinda like riding a bike.

Efficiency.

There's 0 chance if you have to pick up your mouse that you can keep up with a Unix gray beard.

That's just editing, if they're from the emacs era there might be nothing you can do with text faster across their whole system.

I like vscode as a entry point, but if you care to get faster learning just vim motions and sys utils alone is going to cut time from the process.

This is incredibly true. The hardware manufacture process is a slow turning and cost centric wheel, but it's always forward looking. If it doesn't exist today you are building around compromises made outside the scope of your concerns.

Anyone whose had to work on DEC or Sun hardware can describe in excruciating detail about how minor implementation differences in hardware cascade down the chain. (Missing) Rubber washers determined a SAN max writes once, lest the platters vibrating cause the chassis to walk across the floor.

'Universal' support is always a myth, and carving up what segment to target is shooting one moving target while standing on another one unless you have exclusive control of implementation of the whole chain (apple).

So, most of the knowledge of what levers are exploited is going to come out of industry. I don't expect him to know a common persons problems, but he might know how to help.

When Obama was nominated I pretty instantly had my pulse raised over Tom Wheeler (FCC) and Tim Geitner (treasury), only to find myself surprised by Tom. His pick Jessica Rosenworcel is probably the best thing in my lifetime, and common carrier laws have only really held because he's been ready to stick it to Comcast.

Geitner should be behind bars.

It really depends, and a lot of what's on record from their time in industry is the company line. it's kind of counter intuitive, but things like 'pork' in bills in congress get cooperation because they can seek new organizations of power.

Divide and conquer works on the powerful too.

Science of identity?

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7ashCzbsVdFI8ves0cF4HW

I hadn't heard of it til the odd confluence of seeing Prysner's name on QAA. His own podcast eyes left covers her recent bio.

There's some evidence she's a cult member, and was posturing as some kind of Manchurian candidate.

No, really.

Mike Prysner has made a few decent podcasts (QAA, eyes left) following her political career and service. I don't think you can definitionally tie her to membership, but she's got some questionable associations.

Cisco has been clueless for awhile. The people who want speed don't trust them to do basic network stacks, they want to do something more complicated?

The HFT industry noticed Cisco was messing with routing stacks, and you can essentially look to the entire market cap of Arista as a direct result. Specifically people wanting to avoid the headaches of the nexus line (EOS is nice!).

They are the victims of their own success to the point they long ago cannibalized actual product innovation. A lot of the industry still wants their certs, but nobody I know who values speed (local stripped back switches) or stability/availability (AWS and minimal office equipment) would chose them for much. A lot of the purchases are from big players with long contracts, the "Nobody got fired for IBM" of network equipment.

This just screams moving deck chairs on the Titanic.

For the most part what kind of company you are is what kind of product you're selling or making money off of.

So you could contend that Tesla is a battery company or a car company feasibly. Nobody ahead of the AI bubble would have mentioned Tesla and artificial intelligence in the same category.

Besides, if it's what he makes money selling Tesla is a tax credit company.