A new system, a new start

Hey Luc, what’s going on? Why were you away so long?

Well, me and my awesome colleagues (yes, they sometimes check this blog) have been migrating away from big-tech like Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Apple etc. Not because they were no good (most of our core is still running on AWS servers) but because we became sick of the AI-slop and data-sucking most are nowadays involved in. Anyways, we also decided to do a bit of self-hosting and move all our laptops to something different. No more Ubuntu or Fedora but suckless DWM on Arch (with the LTS & performance kernels).

Migrating was tough, writing a bunch of add-ons even harder, but the final result is here to stay. On a personal note on my 2 systems I additionally:

• Removed my 2 external monitors and keyboard. Not to be minimalist, but to reduce context switching. I kept the mouse because speed still matters.
• The same thing with my software. Vim became nVim which turned in Lazy-Vim (maybe later nvi). Alacritty became xterm, then st. And Firefox became qutebrowser.

I didn’t look for the lighter tools, but for ones I could trust and reason about. Less abstraction, fewer surprises.

Today I use two identical laptops – one for work, one personal – same setup, side by side, one mouse for each. The environment disappears, and the work stays.

And for what its worth, the DWM I’m sporting now is one that no one else has; it is mine and in that sense truly unique. You build your own program, patches, the binds et al. Making sure all prerequisites are fulfilled you can then just copy your suckless configs to basically any distro and run a sudo make clean install.

I guess I finally found my sweet spot after all.

PS. A video showcasing various suckless tools will follow. Till then, if interested, you could pay the Bread on Penguins YT channel a visit. Its content is absolutely fantastic. I swear, if she’d move to Europe, I wouldn’t hesitate to offer her a job.