Uses

So the other day I recalled there was a way to write prose more comfortably with *vim, but I didn’t remember the specific plugin. I knew, however, that I discovered it while binge-watching all of Eric Murphy’s videos in the span of a week or two (a common practice in my high school years, luckily no longer common). He was sort of a mentor for me in all that relates to Web and Linux QOL, and his thumbnails are all great, let’s be honest.

Anyways, after finding the Gojo video, I went to Eric’s website to see if there was any new activity (there isn’t since mid-2024, maybe he has taken up farming), I saw his Uses page and I thought it would be nice if I had one. Also, I don’t know what to write about here yet, so this serves as an icebreaker, too. You will notice a lot of my choices in software are the same as his, because well, I discovered many of them through his channel.

Software

• I use Fedora Sway for my Framework 13. I initially chose Fedora because it is on the laptop’s officially supported OSes list and it wasn’t Ubuntu, thinking I’d install something else eventually, but the only change I’ve made to it so far is switching to the Sway Spin. It doesn’t have the most up-to-date software sometimes, but the guides are really good and I like their decisions on system software.

• I use Linux Mint on my PC. Back in high school, I installed Arch on it and learnt a lot that way (I actually recommend installing Arch on bare metal as a first Linux distro, and only using a phone to browse the wiki until you can use Arch itself to browse it; it’s like shock therapy), but I had issues from time to time and eventually my Nvidia card decided to just not allow me to use the computer on college finals, so I booted a Mint USB from a friend and haven’t looked back. Now my PC is the “LTS” machine of my stack, so to speak.

• Alpine has a special place in my heart (also in a really old (and burnt) laptop of mine). It’s fast, consumes no RAM and basically resurrected an Asus laptop I used until I got the Framework. I may eventually power it back on and experiment with it, or use it as a server or something. Anyways, if you’ve got old / low-end hardware, but still like Linux, Alpine is really good, and offers a lot of alternatives to mainstream software such as SystemD or even sudo.

• This list will be expanded / refactored!