re: trying new software

a long while ago I expressed interest in trying various software. I haven't gotten around to writing a followup until now.

here's a list of software I mentioned in the previous post and have gotten around to trying and/or dismissing:

• neovim: I am now using neovim-qt for all my local editing, and nvi (or busybox vi where nvi would be out of my way to get) for quick configuration editing and remote file editing. I like having one main editor, which encourages me to keep my configuration under my main desktop user rather than trying to synchronise dotfiles across hosts. it also incentivises revision control: increasingly I have made git repositories on my desktop, written what I needed, and then pulled my commits onto remote servers. it's an implicit backup as well; if anything happens to the server, my configs still live locally and on that repository.
• I decided I do not want to try neomutt or any similar TUI mail client. I have been using Claws Mail for a while (as well as Firefox ESR to fill in the rest of the void that was left after abandoning SeaMonkey) and for the most part I enjoy it. however, I would like to have something entirely commandline-driven that doesn't use any RAM when idle.

• sway and wayland: I've been using it on my laptop to mitigate screen tearing, but it is not yet suitable for my desktop needs such as gaming and compatibility with various software. I like the UNIX socket-based I/O for communication with the compositor, which theoretically should allow a group e.g. desktop to use the desktop much like xhost would, with standard file permissions rather than host specifications. however, while the idea is sound, the current implementation and expectations of use is rocky. luckily, there is talk on the wayland-devel mailing list to allow easier configuration for one system user per application, which would be good for sandboxing applications.

  I will stick with X for a while longer and perhaps switch back to it on my laptop, if I can find an anti-tearing configuration that works well with my laptop. I've tried a few things such as compositors, but I have a few tricks left that will hopefully mitigate the issue.

• ConnMan and NetworkManager were only relevant when I needed USB tethering and bluetooth PAN, but now I have a wireless card installed in my desktop. I just use wpa_supplicant for this. there's a wpa_gui that comes with it but I have not personally used it.

• Void Linux is extremely mediocre. this is the distro I have been using on my laptop for a while; at first it seemed fine, but as I needed certain packages (especially server ones, since I'm using my laptop as a home server to an extent) it became apparent to me that the package maintainership was crap. the developers and maintainers were difficult to talk to without them rudely pointing to their github issue tracker, they had an unfriendly IRC channel, and their mailing list was a joke. their main communication channels seem to be github and reddit, neither of which I use any longer.

  despite not being a good distro (by my standards), Void has definitely played a role of introducing the runit init system to me. it gave me interest into daemontools-inspired software and has led me perhaps to use runit or similar on my other setups.

• contrastly, Gentoo has met my qualifications for a good linux distribution. I recently installed it on a build-server VM to build the packages necessary for my desktop; that way I could just download the resultant binary packages to my desktop, saving my home CPU from extensive compilation. USE flags are a blessing, and savedconfig as well as patchsets make installing software such as busybox, st, and dmenu into something fun rather than tedious. I can check those packages out into portage just as I would any non-custom package; something you can't do in binary distributions without writing your own packages from scratch.

some other stuff I've changed about my setup since then:

• I've decided that tmux meant yet another configuration file to write and keep synchronised between hosts. not to mention, tmux has some minor bugs and issues, and the overall complexity of such a program means that if more bugs come along in future releases (side note: at the time of writing, 3.0a is set to release soon) then I have to waste more time fixing those new bugs.

  instead, I have made the slow transition to abduco and tabbed. tabbed has some bugs of its own, such as randomly stealing focus in some window managers (which evidently includes i3, my manager of choice), but perhaps when I apply this patch it will be fine. it's just something I haven't gotten around to yet.

  abduco and tabbed work well with ssh connection multiplexing (check ssh_config(5) for the ControlMaster and other relevant configuration options) and for local terminal sessions. I've made a few helper scripts to let me easily spawn new sessions as well as re-attach to existing ones, much like I would do with tmux attach.

• I've finally switched from KeePass to pass and like it very much. the third-party ecosystem surrounding pass is high-quality and additive to the experience. it works with firefox (the PassFF addon is much cleaner-looking than KeePassXC's addon), it works with my phone (cloning via git so I don't need to run syncthing or other syncing software), and it lets me auto-type from dmenu, with a global hotkey I set in i3 to spawn the password prompt. I no longer have to run a password manager in the background that uses up around a hundred megabytes of memory when idle, and in the future, I could write utilities for myself to expand upon pass.

there's plenty of other things I've tried and started using since 2018; I may detail my entire setups at some point, but for now these are the talking points that came to my mind.

I have a bunch of other stuff to write about as well, so bear with me as I collect my thoughts and set aside some time to write more to my blog.