think tank forum

hey! what OSes, window managers/environs, and other related software do you use?

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atlas, freebsd, home file server

my file server at home (running freebsd) has recently gotten use as a desktop computer. but i don't have it fully operational; it just has taken too long to get everything setup! while some things work surprisingly well for freebsd, some things have been a struggle. my chipset only supports 30 Hz, which makes Xorg fairly unbearable.

firefox---good. my biggest (or only) complaint is the font rendering. firefox sync works, youtube videos play, and fastmail apps work well enough.

opera---meh. seems slower than firefox, which is really saying something. sync throws a generic error. so i don't use it on freebsd

vlc player---good

pdf viewing---okay, but i need good printing support, and i don't have printing working at all currently.

yubioath-desktop---haven't been able to get it working with my yubikeys using CCID.

gpg---works well with my yubikeys for PGP.

i think the awful refresh rate really keeps me from putting more effort into setting it up for work. accordingly, here are things i want to do but haven't yet actively sought:

- programming (maybe running a local vm as a dev webserver)
- versioning (git, svn, etc.)
- writing in latex

i3 manages my windows. i hate it

i use google-chrome. it's a memory hog and it tears, but at least it doesn't ever crash

mpv plays videos well. i have my own program for setting the refresh rate to 23.976 for film since xrandr can't set fractional refresh rates

okular and zathura display documents only okay

git (and sometimes git-annex) stores everything i care about. i love it!

i have started writing documents in groff (and tbl, eqn pic, ...). much less frustrating than latex

thanks for the response. your expediency is pretty amazing for an otherwise dead website here!

i'll have to look into some of those programs you referenced. thanks!

i'm hoping that phi_ will mosey on by now...

I'm on mac 100% now (except servers and a random torrent box running xubuntu). firefox is amazing now (after the quantum thing). iina is a great modern alternative to vlc on mac now. been using 1password (costs money) for my password manager for a while and I love it. everything else is kinda just the built in stuff (mail.app, itunes/music.app, photos, etc.). oh and iterm2 is crucial on macos too.

is it easy to make a mac clone with recent versions of mac os?

I use Void Linux, with dwm. It "Just Works"™ and gets out of my way. I run xbanish to hide the cursor when typing.

I use Firefox as my browser. I don't think it matters that much which browser you use to be honest, but at least Firefox isn't contributing to the Blink monoculture.

Most of my work is done in st terminal with Vim.

I switched from tcsh to zsh last year; took me a day to get the config ported, but generally works pretty well.

I mostly just use standard unix tools (cp, mv, ls); the only other one I regularly use is ag/the_silver_searcher. These days there's also ripgrep, which may be a little better, but little reason to switch if you're already used to ag. Maybe I'll get around to it eventually.

I use the Fastmail web client for email, and Spotify for music.

Little fancy beyond that: mpv, git, etc. The usual stuff.

yeah i'm trying to use firefox to avoid webkit world. i'm very anti-google

d you use any versioning? git/hg/svn/cvs (lol)?

I just use git, because it's the "default". I actually like hg more, but especially if you want to solicit contributions/PRs from others using git lowers the barrier of entry for most. It is what it is *shrug*.

yeah.

fastmail ftw! I recently moved my contacts/calendars/notes from icloud into fastmail (I've been using them for email for a while now). still stuck in the apple ecosystem for photos mostly (and the great laptop trackpads).

dagr8gatzy knows about mac clones/hackintoshes, I think he uses a "desktop" one almost full-time at this point.

vardo (eeePC 1005HAB - OpenBSD/i686 6.8) is running cwm, mostly using base X applications. Fast AF (even with apm throttling the CPU to 800MHz) and my daily driver still. Even have my work stuff integrated in with terminal apps.

ravachol (self-refurbed ThinkPad T400 - OpenBSD/amd64 6.8) is running cwm as well. Just with plan9port integration and support apps. I was using this a lot, but mainly now is my mobile workstation when I need to do some photo work on the go.

vercingetorix (some liberated HP desktop - CentOS 8.2) is running KDE Plasma 5, it's kind of a memory hog, but this is my CAD/editing workstation so I have some to spare.

sounds like lots of fun

It's not bad! I got fed up with the RAM and swap bogging Plasma was doing and swapped to dwm as my main environment on vercingetorix. That alone makes this computer WAY faster. Only issue is a number of programs I use are flatpak'd, so they run in a VM sandbox, so my SCAD seems slower than it should be. I should probably see about flags and confs about it at some point here soon.

I have since set up vardo as my main dev environment and server. Maintains a local copy of my work e-mail, have httpd setup to act as my own little homepage/bookmark page for any machine on the LAN. NFS serves up the shared filespaces for my code projects so I can access them on other computers (such as vercingetorix or ravachol, since I have a lot of plan9 integration on them). It holds my music (most of the hard drive space is here) and mpd serves it. I can even use this remotely so I have my own radio station going on the road or at work. Have the below in my .rcrc and sets mpd to start playing randomly every track not in the youtubedl/ directory.

fn mpdradio() {
mpc -q clear
mpc listall | grep -v youtubedl | mpc -q add
mpc -q random on
mpc -q consume off
mpc -q repeat on
mpc -q play
}

how long does this take you to set up and maintain? sounds very complicated to me. but i guess i'm lazy

Honestly, I'm not positive. Most of these were implemented bit-by-bit as I had time/desire. Really, anything on the CentOS machine takes longer for me because I'm just so used to OpenBSD. I spend half the time trying to find config files it seems like.

For vardo, though, it's all pretty easily done. I don't have a lot of requirements and the data stays inside the LAN. The few daemons/servers I have running on there are either in base or installed binary packages. OpenBSD provides sane defaults for the config files so most of my time was making sure I had the correct paths/auth info in them. Once they were running, I haven't really touched them since. Been really stress-free.

Just installed radicale to (hopefully) maintain my own CalDAV/CardDAV server. Toying with the idea of a local IMAP server to act as a central connection point for my few e-mail addresses, but I'm not thinking that's going to be worth it, lol.

Yo, fuck WebDAV and its ilk. That's my takeaway from trying that.

With the demise of CentOS (lol) I have migrated vercingetorix back to OpenBSD/amd64. Feels like home .