It has been my pleasure 😊!

I can’t believe you tried

Just in case*, I'm just the middle-man that connects this specific article by Solène to the audience on Lemmy 😅. I'm sure you're aware of this, but I just wanted to make sure.

But yes, Solène has done an excellent work with her review! Which is precisely why I felt the need that it needed some more exposure 😜.

It is a little sad that OpenBSD can’t optimize by P/E cores, I have been wanting to switch to OpenBSD but obviously Linux supports the most hardware, so I stay with Linux.

Could you elaborate on your willingness to switch to OpenBSD?

It is nice that the makers NovaCustom seem to have done a good job creating a mostly open, standards compliance x86_64 computing platform.

Definitely! I feel as if they might be somewhat underappreciated currently, but I hope their efforts to open source will receive similar mainstream reach like what we've seem for System76 etc.

Also, from what I understand, they accept Monero for their laptops.

That's very cool. I didn't even know that. Thank you for mentioning that!

I've indeed been pleasantly surprised by Helix since I've started these posts. I'm also more optimistic than initially regarding its future prospects. I'll look into it and perhaps I'll have some use for it. Thank you!

I’m not using lsp in Neovim so if I need lsp I’ll just pull out emacs. If I’m already in the terminal I’ll usually pull out Neovim to edit a file, but if I’m writing like markdown or something that uses images I like the ability to display images inline in emacs. LaTeX is always something I do in emacs because there’s a built in pdf viewer in emacs and there’s built in spell check also. In the terminal in emacs, sometimes I open up Neovim to do a quick edit because of muscle memory from the terminal. One thing that’s really cool about Neovim is that you can embed it in other applications, so if I really have to use an ide that’s not emacs, I’ll just do that.

Wow, the insights! *Vehemently noting these down somewhere* Heck, I think you've cracked the code. Since I've created these posts, I became more and more aware of how great both Emacs and (Neo)Vim are. And while I was already flirting with the idea to perhaps use both, I think you've just completely obliterated any other option; which is a good thing. As such, I'm actually grasping for words that would somehow be able to properly convey the feelings of gratitude I currently experience. For whatever it's worth; thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Yeah there’s a thing called EAF, which allows python and javascript to be embedded in emacs. It allows for more complex applications to be built in emacs, similar to VSCode. I’m not sure how difficult it is to make something with EAF, but I haven’t really seen any things written in it that aren’t in the EAF organization. I think the future could be EAF or maybe something like EAF to be able to leverage the power of the javascript ecosystem like how VSCode does for a lot of plugins. There have been some attempts to rewrite emacs in different languages, but emacs is too large, and you would lose the old ecosystem by doing that.

Once more; much appreciated!

There’s a larger community around Doom Emacs, and Doom Emacs looks nicer. Honestly though it doesn’t matter that much which one you use since they are both pretty good.

Yet again; I'm grateful! Have a good one! I wish you and your loved ones the best!

It’s not my main IDE, mainly due to working with Java dev and needing a debugger.

I thought debugging was taken care of by nvim-dap and similar plug-ins. I suspect they aren't as feature-complete then compared to those found on 'real' IDEs. Or is it perhaps something else?

eMacs is better used as a standalone application than in the terminal.

Yeah, support for using Emacs within a terminal is mainly there for legacy purposes if I remember correctly. But IIRC Neovim also allows usage outside of the terminal. Which begs the question; what functionality does this bring to the table for Neovim?

My primary use for emacs is org mode.

I haven't even started using Emacs extensively, but from what I've seen it definitely seems to be its killer function. Though, I'm interested to know if you've tried using Emacs as an IDE? If so, how did that go?

I use it to orchestrate Docker containers for my infrastructure and then some.

Very interesting. I will definitely look into this! Much appreciated!

It has been my pleasure! I'm curious on what you'll end up doing. So please consider to report back if it isn't too much to ask :blush: !

Good questions!

I assume getting a persistent environment in a USB recovery stick is a bigger task?

I actually don't know if penguins-eggs allows persistent environments 🤔 . Though, other tools might be better fit for the job. Personally I'd recommend you to follow this guide for openSUSE Leap. A similarly good guide/documentation for Debian is absent, and openSUSE Leap is likewise a good fit due to it being supported over a longer time period as well. The steps outlined in the guide might be a bit more involved, but the team behind openSUSE have done a wonderful job to ensure accessibility.

I’m imagining that, with your method, I would need to repeat this process any time I wanted to update the image or load specific new kernel modules/drivers?

With the method outlined in my previous comment, you only have to repeat the process from scratch if you didn't save the Debian install some way or another. If you did keep the Debian install around, then you could just; open it up, apply some updates/changes or (un)install additional packages and make yet another live image out of it. Granted, the openSUSE Leap persistent Live USB that has been previously mentioned in this comment is easier to change later down the line regardless.

Btw, -to my knowledge- the persistent Live USB environment is also possible on other distros like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu etc. So arguably it's best to first look at which distro satisfies your needs in regards to package availability. After which, in my opinion, LTS/Stable releases ought to be preferred over the others.

First of all: thank you! The necessary info is there and it's written splendid. I think it or a future iteration should definitely be considered as a sticky post in the long run.

A few nitpicks which you may or may not agree with:

• In the section in which you talk about update frequency, you end the paragraph with something along the lines of "new and stable". While this is correct technically, you should define what you mean with 'stable' here. Because there exist two (somewhat related) definitions for 'stable':

  1. "(Certain) resistance to breaking" - which is used in the context of "stable rolling release" when one refers to something like openSUSE Tumbleweed. This definition does not necessarily oppose new.

  2. "Release model in which packages are frozen over a long(er) period of time and primarily only continue to receive security updates" - which is e.g. used in the name of the "Debian Stable" distro. This definition does oppose new.

• In the section about desktop environments you mentioned something along the lines that Fedora defaults to GNOME. This applies only to their Workstation and Silverblue distros. For which both other "Spins" exist, which happens to be the recommended method of installing another desktop environment on Fedora; similar to how "Flavors" work for something like Ubuntu. While one can technically install it like how you've mentioned it, I wouldn't recommend it to a newer user.

So, initially I stuck to bash and tried to get improved functionality through ble.sh etc. However, for reasons unknown to me, it always seemed to be a buggy mess that was prone to break. Eventually I switched after breaking one last time, where I only had installed ble.sh on a fresh/stock bash; which was the primary contributor that made bash bearable. So if I couldn't use ble.sh, I had no reason to stick to it.

When faced with the choice of where to go next, I quickly dismissed fish for not being POSIX-compliant. Furthermore, as bash is standard on Linux, so too is zsh standard on macOS. And that enables it to have legs beyond fish. However I also kept fish in mind as somewhat of a last resort if all else failed.

So I began venturing into zsh and was obviously overwhelmed by the myriad of plugins and plugin-managers. People generally go out and somehow stick to ohmyzsh, however it was clearly poorly managed and couldn't quite deal with the feature-creep in an elegant way.

Many plugin-managers have come out over the years as alternatives that promised to resolve those issues. However, while some of them succeeded initially, they weren't able to keep that up throughout their lifespan.

When I almost lost hope and had started to gravitate towards learning how I should manage my plugins on my own without any plugin-managers I stumbled upon ZSH Quickstart Kit. Which is a project that's clearly well-maintained and offered must-have functionality like automatically updating the the plugin-manager, plugins and more while still trying to maintain a high standard of reliability, performance, customization and minimalism. So obviously I had been sold on it and the rest has been history.

Ultimately it's for you to decide whichever one of the two suits you best. But if you gave zsh a try and wasn't quite sold on ohmyzsh or any of the other plugin-managers out there, then perhaps consider ZSH Quickstart Kit.

Get your priorities straight. Picking a distro to stick with becomes a lot easier that way.

To give an example of how I dealt with this myself in the past.

Number 1 priority for me was and still is security. I'm willing to give up performance and convenience for the sake of security. A shortlist of distros that in some capacity suffice: Fedora, openSUSE, Gentoo, Arch(/Artix), Alpine, Void, Spectrum OS, Qubes OS, Kicksecure, Whonix, Tails.

However...:

• Whonix and Tails fall off for not being a daily driver.
• My laptop can't handle Qubes OS.
• Spectrum OS is still WIP.
• Gentoo, Void and Arch(/Artix) require the user to set it all up themselves, but as a newbie I needed a distro that would do the heavy-lifting for me.
• Alpine seemed cool, but I wasn't able to deal with issues related to musl.

So Fedora, Kicksecure and openSUSE remain. While Kicksecure (arguably) has superior defaults (when it comes to security), it is still a relatively small project compared to juggernauts like Fedora and openSUSE, so I was inclined to dismiss it unless Fedora and openSUSE weren't able to keep up. Then I learned about how both Fedora and openSUSE had so-called immutable variants, so I got interested in those and what they had to offer. And even though they were still a bit crude, unpolished and kinda finicky to work with; the promise and potential was clearly there. I was especially amused by how Fedora's rpm-ostree enabled one to forego unknown states, bitrot, configuration drift etc and was a very serious step-up compared to all the other options. Soon after I realized that I had found the distro and the rest is history... Since, I've obviously found other distros that had some interesting things going on, however none of them (besides the promise of Vanilla OS' 2.0) has been able to deliver in terms of security and reproducibility. So for me it's still rather clear cut.

In your case, to me at least, it seems you're inherently attracted towards stable distros (like Debian) but lust after rolling release due to the newer packages they offer. So in your case I'd actually recommend the following:

• Main system: Debian(/Devuan)
• Install Nix and access Nix packages through there.
• Finally, install packages you still need but can't find elsewhere through the AUR but within a container. I would recommend Distrobox as it makes this go rather easy and painless.