Here I am, with a shitty laptop laying in my bed. The time is late and Windows is updating. We all know that feeling of sitting there waiting for Windows to update!! It was horrible and made me long for something better. If only the next best thing wasn't Mac :(. Then came this magical penguin, it smacked the shit outta me and said KISS, Keep it Simple Stupid!! That was the start of my journey into FOSS.
Well obviously that story is BS, but I wish it was true. Honestly I been playing around in Linux for a long time and do not even remember when it began, but the journey has been pretty fun. Linux is not tech savy and geeky like people think. You can download Ubuntu and use it without even knowing what a commandline is. People just don't like change, they don't want to move away from what is comfortable, don't want to dip their toes into something new. Well that is what this blog is about, trying to survive in a world I was definitly not comfortable in.
Desktops are what allows you to interact with your system. Its what shows your taskbar at the bottom of the screen, what allows you to open a browser and move it around the screen. Its what even makes your mouse a usable tool. Desktop Enviroments or DE's are not something people who use Windows and Mac tend to worry about. Its not something they have to worry about. Im not going to get super technical because I dont know all that stuff, but I will tell you that the DE's one Windows and Mac are severly limited! The sheer amount of customizations that can be done on a DE in Linux is mind-blowing! There is a DE called KDE that can be built in almost anyway you can think of, its incredible. It opens up your computer to something called "personality"! You are really able to make your computer feel like yours beyond just a wallpaper. However if you remember at the beginning of the story I mentioned a shitty laptop, well that part was true and it was very limiting when it came to choosing a DE. Some DE's use a lot more system resources then others and can play a big part in choosing one. Although there are some lightweight DE's that are aimed at low-resource laptops you then lose some of the goodies that make DE's look cool. Good thing we are on Linux and have the freedom to choose, and my choice was to not choose one at all!!
DE's have all these goodies that that add to the system resource usage, but at the core they all have whats called a window manager. A WM is responible for well, managing windows lol. That is all they are good for. Moving, Opening, Closing, and Resizing windows, thats it! No title bars, no status bars, certain programs don't even have scroll bars. I still dont have a way to tell the time or see the battery life on my laptop lol!! Now thats light on resources! When my computer starts, it opens into a TTY, which is basically a terminal. From here I can only do things on the commandline, I can't open up windows, just type text. Think of it like interacting with a server over ssh(not that the people reading this will understand that, if this is even people reading lol). Anyway using this commandline I can now start X. X is the display server for Linux and what allows me to use my WM. X is so important that every WM or DE needs access to it. X also has a new shiny brother like everything in the tech world called Wayland, I only know of it, so no info from me sorry. My WM of choice is Herbstluftwm, I been thru so many WM that I can't even count, but I am only going to stick with the one I use.
Now that you made it all they way through this blog post its time to end it. I told myself that I am going to blog the whole year, and if that is to be true then I will need things to blog about. My WM will definitly be blogged about and will be used to make more content. This was just the beginning on the road to my minimal set up!
See you next time!!