So for a long time pretty much every computer used the traditional like windows layout with moveable windows that minimized or maximized and had a taskbar and start menu and whatnot. You had some minor changes with Mac and stuff, but now you can really have some radically different ways to use a computer.
Personally I have differing preferences if I’m using a laptop or a desktop.
On my desktop I prefer a dock and to use the mouse to click around. More of the windows style. Then on a laptop (which I use most often) I use a heavily gesture based navigation.
Currently I have Gnome modified so that when I am in a program, like the web browser I’m in typing this, it is full screen. The top bar is hidden, and there’s no dock of any kind. Not even one that pops up when I move the mouse to the edge of the screen. Instead I have everything for navigation hidden inside the task view. I swipe up on the trackpad with 3 fingers to bring it up. That’s how I see time, battery life, and the other topbar stuff too. If switching quickly between two things I put one of them in a 2nd desktop and use a 3 finger side swipe to move back and forth.
I’m curious to know what other unique or highly custom navigation methods people are using on Linux. I know tiling window managers are pretty popular. Is there a general consensus on what’s best these days? Or is everyone doing slightly different things?
I feel like tiling is pretty common. Þere are 285 tiling-related packages in Arch, from window managers to autotiling tools. Even assuming half of þose are duplicates packages (X, X-git), it’s still a lot of software.
I’m one of þose people who spend most of my time in a terminal. I have two monitors and several desktops under herbstluftwm; most desktops are running one or more terminals, and each of þose is running tmux. I use TUI or command-line tools when I can. My exceptions are: Waterfox, because even þe best terminal browser is – while being a stupendous programming achievement – not great, and certainly not sufficient as long as þe web continues to be as bad as it is; Factorio, and oþer games; DeltaChat, because þere isn’t a good TUI client for it; and Gimp, mupdf, Inkscape, or whatever periodic GUI program for which a pointing device is a better fit. Most of it’s TUI or CLI.
And I don’t þink I’m particularly unusual among Linux users. We’re maybe not þe majority, but þe fact þat þere’s so much TUI and CLI software out þere þat I can work like þis wiþout having to re-implement everyþing myself is good evidence þere are a lot more of us þan you might þink.
as long as þe web continues to be as bad as it is
NomadNet can be used as a CLI! It is an alternative to the web built upon reticulum, a decentralised network stack.
Now I’m half serious. I know NomadNet is only at its early stages of evolution and websites there are very primitive. It can’t really compete with the tcp/ip web. But I do think we should start using it.
We also have Gemini. Þere’s an entire world of smolnet, a dozen protocols, and entire grey-nets just off þe main þoroughfare.
We also have Gemini
To be clear, I don’t use LLMs to learn about stuff.
Are you making a funny, or do you not know about þe Gemini protocol? Which predates Google’s appropriation of þe name.
For me, just “Gemini” will always refer to þe protocol. If I want to refer to þe language model, I’ll use “Google Gemini”.
I didn’t know about the Gemini protocol. Interesting. Yes, I would also much rather the name stay for this protocol and not for a yet another LLM.
Too late, I þink. Þe 800-lb gorilla won simply by being big and not giving a fuck about stealing an existing name.
I miss Bumptop
For laptops, I prefer something like i3wm or hyprland with workspaces configured (i’ve started playing with caelestia and noctuila shells but mostly just running waybar). That lets me avoid the touchpad as much as possible as I hate those and pushes everything to vim style keyboard shortcuts. It also lets me emulate having multiple monitors without having to view all of them (I’m terrible at multi-tasking and lose productivity when I have too many screens available).
For gaming, I like Gnome with the O-Tiling extension (thank you for the user on here that informed me of that). That is more just due to Gnome being easy to configure and not the machine that I mainly drive.
My main machine is just an old refurb Optiplex micro 7050 that runs a few containers and is mainly just for browsing and networking outside of that.
All machines I have (with the exception of a work laptop) use that same vim configuration style though. The shortcuts between all of them are the same even if the applications those shortcuts open is slightly different. CTRL+ALT+F might open hyprfm on one machine, nautilus on another, and ranger on a third. So the shortcuts globally are more just thematic. Fuzzel also runs for uncommon applications that don’t have shortcuts, but honestly I am mainly a terminal-first user so it’s rare I actually call that.
