TITLE="Andrea Corsini's computing"
DESCRIPTION="List and comments about my daily personal computing, softwares and hardware I use."
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My Computing
You can find a short list of the main softwares I use daily on
my personal drives. My personal daily computing regards browsing
the internet, checking my emails, occasional coding and
writing.
Although I do nothing fancy and complicated, I do have some
requirements. The main concerns are about control
and lightweightness. I want to be in charge of the
computations that happen on my machine, what is running and what
is not. I want to control which software is using bandwidth. I
want to be able to check the behaviour of any of my software,
and potentially change it to confomr it to my needs. I want to
be the user, not to be used. These thoughts are pretty much what
the Free Software Foundation
(FSF) and the GNU project is advocating.
Not as important as the freedom on computing, I wish, whenever
possible, that the softwares I use are unbloated. I prefer
lightweight over fancy. That is why I don't mind to
use Terminal User Interfaces (TUI) over GUI when is
convinient to do so.
- Operative System
- I normally run
Arch-based
distributions, because once installed, they contains only
essential softwares to get started, no unwanted bloat and I
can build my personal desktop directly. In particular I
run Parabola GNU/Linux-libre, an FSF-approved
100% free (as
in: freedom) operating system. Not any computer can run a
100% free distribution, due to nonfree firmware blobs (more
about it in the hardware section
below). So in other secondary laptops that cannot run
Parabola, my fallback is plain Arch Linux.
- Window Manager/Desktop Environment
- I don't have a desktop environment, except for the
collection of scripts, softwares and configurations that I have
put together. I run
the Suckless window
manager
called dwm with
several patches applied on it. Apart from the keybings for
main
programs, dmenu
helps me to execute the other software installed. dmenu is
very dynamic and easy to be integrated with other scripts and
utility. For instance, I use it to select wireless
connections, device mounts, integration with the password
manager and so forth.
- Shell and Terminal
- I use Zsh as interactive shell. I normally run the shell
interpreter within st - simple
terminal. I applied some reasonable patches from
the Suckless
collection, such as scrolling, transparency, background color
change on focus, solarized dark theme, boxdraw and so forth. If
emacs is already running, I will probably use the integrated
terminal, instead of st.
- Email
- I read my emails within emacs throught mu4e, an email client
based on
mu. Its message
filter is super powerful, it helps me to find any message really
quickly. The account configurations took me time to get it right,
but the effort was worth.
- Editor
- GNU Emacs
for any task that goes further than 1 minute. Some features that
changed my life are org-mode (org-agenda, org-...), magit, dired,
tramp. I found the out-of-the-box experience really inconvinient,
the configuration tooks me really a lot of time, but now is tailored
to any task I need. For the sake of learning, I still configured
emacs personally, I could have gone with an Emacs distribution
instead? Now I am trying Emacs Doom for curiosity. For small changes
I go for vim. I keep my vim as simple and unpolished as possible,
so I can have a similar experience when I occasionally
- Writings
- LaTeX, Libre Office with others
- Browser
- IceCat or Firefox based. I like surf but is so slow
- Passwords
- The standard Unix pass
- RSS reader
- emacs ...
- PDF reader
- zathura, which benefits?
- Screen eye protection
- redshift
Hardware
TP T60, libreboot, open WiFi card.