System Crafting

[gotwf]

@phenomlab Been long time since I used any DE but I would think they would still respect $XDG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf, no? Or maybe Gnome3 over rides it? Hmm… seem to recall some such nonsense…

The latest and greatest freetype and opentype engines are great, howsomever, so I am nowadays hard pressed to improve upon the default anti-aliasing, hinting, subpixel alignment, etc. to tweak fonts into looking better. Whereas not too many years ago such was derigeur.

All else that is left in the chain is hardware side: gpu and display. I’m on a mid range amdgpu and an Eizo main display w/a dot pitch of .23. So that is pretty nice. Not 4K/5K but plenty of K to be a A-Okay with me.

So from there it pretty much breaks down to subjective stylistic choices: I like slashed zeros but can put up with dotted zeros if the rest of the glyphs trip my triggers. I doubt, however, I could get by without doghouse g’s.
And other stuff like that font side.

[phenomlab]

@gotwf said in System Crafting:

Eizo main display

I’ve not heard from EIZO since I used them in the early 2000’s for CRT monitors

@gotwf said in System Crafting:

Been long time since I used any DE

Wait - are you doing literally everything from command line ?

[gotwf]

@phenomlab said in System Crafting:

Wait - are you doing literally everything from command line ?

Click.

To the extent possible. I use a window manager that is very keybinding centric. Focus on keeping hands/fingers over home row. More efficient when it comes to actually getting things done. Going to mouse is considered a cache miss. Last resort. Excepting web browser. There are some keyboard centric browsers out there but I find I still need one main stream, full bloated enchilada. Hence, I confess to making good use of a trackball to drive firefox… But otherwise, yeah, mostly all cli - what’s not to love?

Else maybe look at it this way: Editor, Terminal, Web Browser. Two out of three are cli driven. Hence my workstation “desktop” is very cli centric.

[phenomlab]

@gotwf admittedly, I do everything server wise via CLI - not a DE in sight. However, I’m not sure I could use CLI for everything as that would defeat the purpose of a DE designed for desktop usage, no ?

[gotwf]

@phenomlab Well… it is complicated… My journey is long, not the end all, be all, and likely require a substantial beelog post.

But yeah, as mentioned in one of my bee log articles I linked to somewhere else hereabouts, the big trifecta are 1) Web browser, 2) Terminal, and 3) Editor. Those last two are all command line driven whilst the fist is predominantly gui/rodent driven. Of course there are some one off apps here and there that are predominantly gui driven but they are not part of my daily fare, used to rarely to be of consequence. So, go figure what percentages of time you may spend in each. Maybe, just maybe, that DE is getting in your way more than accelerating productivity? Just maybe… maybe not.