For the first time in my career I’m fully using Linux on my working computer, as well as at home. I almost went the full ricing route. What stuck with me was the combination xorg, i3, gnome-terminal, thunar, polybar.

Couldn’t fall in love with kitty nor alacritty. Wayland is too “secure” for my taste and doesn’t easily scripted automations, which are the basis of a good life on the terminal.

Most of my time is spent in lf and vim. I have grown fond of docker, tmux and Waterfox. All my machines are blazingly fast, no Microslop fan noise anymore. Ollama is running fine with GPU support inside a docker container.

My custom polybar doesn’t offer the full comfort of a real desktop environment but the shutdown button does exactly what it is told, no questions asked. The folder icon opens thunar. The bar also displays swatch internet time, using my own tool written in C, which I’m also hosting as a Debian repository on this website.

I’m currently running Ubuntu and Debian, although Ubuntu will probably leave as the distro is heading into the wrong direction (buggy rust coreutils, no xorg support anymore). I’m using rofi as a search engine for my music library as suggested by Youtuber bread. i3 is all around very satisfying. Its counterpart Sway on Wayland on the other hand didn’t really convince me, because of all of its incompatibilities with i3.

Tiling window managers are cool. On my old Ubuntu setup, it was to cumbersome to build hyprland. Maybe I will try it some day.

Last modified on 2026-03-10