macOS is my favourite operating system. Finder in column view with arrow keys to navigate, combined with space for file preview, is incredibly fast and intuitive. Trackpad integration also results in less hand movement. I’m building a Linux (Bazzite) desktop, though, and I’ve set my sights on the stars.
nnn looks to be an incredible file manager, and was a great recommendation. It looks even more capable than Finder, albeit without scrolling/zooming previews, thanks to macOS having unmatched trackpad functionality. Not to mention Spotlight, which makes opening apps trivial–especially with Alfred available as well. I want to go beyond mere file management, though.
File managenent, browsing, gaming, everything. Just how much can you configure a Linux system to eliminate mouse usage? Shortcut guides welcome (I already know the major ones). I also have a keen interest in tiling window managers, but I’ve not delved that deep yet. I don’t know how to set one up.
Guess I’m forced to learn Emacs/Vim/similar.
I use a firefox plugin on librewolf and i3 (since qubes doesnt support wayland). Mostly works but still some things that require mouse for other gui applications.
How is QubesOS these days?
A lot of fucking around getting it set up in a way i like. Modifying dom0 scripts live, injecting python themes to get dark mode in the qube manager, fucking around compiling dubious drivers from source and installing them in dom0, fuckig around with getting windows to behave itself (havnt got it working but i just have a drive partition i pass back and forth to tranfer data). Other than that its pretty good. I3 is a godsend for efficiency, have got ctr+shift+c/v as muscle memory now.
Am currently fucking around with getting split backend for keepass so i can use the keepassxc browser plugin and have it then requesting access to the keepass backend in a seperate qube. Got it working in 1 qube manually. Currently having systemd kicking my ass over a ncat socket in /run/user/1000/app/org.keepassxc… that doesnt exist untill the browser extension tries to access it but thats well after boot so systemd has already crashed the service.
Overall having lots of fun tinkering. And god do i love the ability to just blow up my os whenever i feel like it. I can sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root whenever i feel like it and my system is fine.
Nice to see what a power user can do with it. What hardware are you using and are you happy with the performance?
Im on a framwork 16 with the cheaper amd cpu, 64gb ram, no dedicated gpu yet tho waiting till that matures a bit (so i can run large llms locally) before i buy one. Performance is great especially with amd since they tend to have many cores. Most things require very little resources and those that dont i can just passthrough more resources. Once uve eaten the virtualization overhead (its surprisingly little) and the multiple instances of linux overhead (also minimal nowdays) the performance is pretty much no different from bare metal u just gotta pass through more resources where u need em (gaming/coding/cad qubes etc).
Qubes is pretty smart ie i can give a qube basicly no initial memory (as long as its enough to fit all monitors worth of pixels in memory) and then give it a large max memory allocation and it will only use what it needs it wont use the entire allocation if it doesnt need it. Same as disk everything (unless u configure otherwise) is a thin volume so u can allocated more storage to a vm than u even have available to the system as a whole.
Btw got split password managment working. God i hate systemd.
Thanks. Once I have a dedicated spare machine again I’ll give it a spin. Haven’t used it in many years.