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Tux the penguin flying

My current setup

Dotfiles

This is a repo for my dotfiles and its kind of fucked up. I finally fix it so I have everything in the dotfiles repo instead of configs getting their own repo and others not.

Why linux

I have always liked being able to customize, mod, and poke inside different things. Computers are machines for us to play around with and use how we see fit yet the only thing the big tech companies want to do it lock everything up and it disgusts me. Fuck google, fuck microsoft, fuck apple, and fuck all the other evil tech companies!!! Its time for the open source revolution and seize them all and open source the entire world!!! Without linux or any other unix life would be much much worse. Linux is my safe place from all the shit in the world.

Window kills kittens

Fedora xfce

Fedora been my go to for quite a while though I sometimes switch desktops lmao. I have tried the gnome version but it doesn't really fit me so most of the time I have used the kde spin though recently kde just haven't been feeling the same. It has been feeling buggy and have been fighting with nvidia drivers. After running xfce on my second computer for a while I grew to really like it and started using it on my main and it have been running much better then kde.

Setting up fedora

Fedora has a little extra setup you wouldn't see in something like linux mint though it isn't that bad.

Packages

You can speed up dnf by adding these to /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
max_parallel_downloads=20
fastestmirror=True

The default repos have lots of stuff but you might want an app that isn't in it like steam. I know the gnome version has a enable 3rd party repos button that does everything I listed here but I am on the xfce version and also had to do this on the kde verison.

  • Setup rpm fusion to get more packages in dnf with the resources here
  • Install flatpak if not already there using "sudo dnf install flatpak" then add flathub to get some cool apps!

Multimedia

By default fedora doesn't have many codecs and you need to install them yourself. Without them many media files will not work and lots of youtube videos will not be able to play. The fedora docs use to show how to install them but they removed it from their page and instead shows a new version which installs some stuff but not everything. I do both of them to make sure I get all the codecs I need.

  • Update your system with sudo dnf upgrade
  • Install the new packages with sudo dnf group install multimedia
  • Install the old ones with these three commands in a row:
    • sudo dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-{bad-\*,good-\*,base} gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 gstreamer1-libav --exclude=gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-devel
    • sudo dnf install lame\* --exclude=lame-devel
    • sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing

Nvidia drivers

Nvidia isn't the best on linux and I like AMD much more though I am stuck with nvidia for now. For xfce there are some extra settings to enable it but it works great once that is done. You will need rpm fusion first before you can install the drivers.

  • Follow the fedora docs on nvidia here
  • Also look at the rpmfusion docs on nvidia here
  • Follow the archwiki on nvidia in lightdm here.
  • For multi monitor refresh rate issues add these to your /etc/environment
    CLUTTER_DEFAULT_FPS=<refresh rate of your sync monitor>
    __GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE=<monitor to sync to>

    Then open your nvidia settings, go to OpenGL Settings and turn off "Allow Flipping".

xfce settings in fedora

By default xfce is a very plain desktop and looks kind of old and shitty (like this website), but it can look and feel great with some work!

  • Install nicer icons with sudo dnf install papirus-icon-theme papirus-icon-theme-dark then set them as your icon theme
  • Install a better theme. Some good ones are:
  • The default menu is alright but I like whisker menu more.
    • Install it with sudo dnf install xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin
    • Go into the panel settings to remove the old one and change it to whisker menu.
  • Enable clipman as one of the startup apps for a kde like clipboard.
  • Make some nicer keybinds:
    • I like to bind the xfce4-popup-whiskermenu command to shift-super. You can't bind things to just super in xfce. It will break other shortcuts.
    • Bind "super+v" to xfce4-clipman-history to make it feel more like the kde clipboard
  • Make new windows show up at the mouse by going into the "Window ManagerTweaks" "Placement" tab, turning the minimum size all the way up and chaning the place windows position to under the mouse pointer.

Rofi in xfce

The default xfce appfinder been causing me issues lately so I decided to switch to rofi.

To make rofi work with my workflow I like to add some binds for it:
  • Bind rofi -show drun -icon-theme "Papirus-Dark" -show-icons to super+d
  • Bind rofi -show run to super+r
There is much more I could use rofi for but this is all I need.

Useful things in fedora

Fedora doesn't have "update-grub" so instead you have to use these:
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2.cfg
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2-efi.cfg

icecat

I use to use firefox but switched to librewolf because mozilla is evil as fuck. If you don't know librewolf it its the ungoogled-chromium of firefox. Than I switched from librewolf to icecat.

The builtin plugins are decent. Librejs and its other contend blocking plugins are way more annoying than something like umatrix but I am giving them a fair chance knowing that umatrix might not have much of a future even if its still quite functional still. I still like to install ublock even with everything that comes builtin.

Settings

The clipboard doesn't work in icecat by default so go into about:config and change dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to true.

Search engines

The best search engine is searx. Finding instances can be annoying because a lot of time the engine you want to use gets blocked.

Claws mail

I have used thunderbird in the past though like I said before mozilla is evil as fuck. I have some gmail accounts and haven't gotten them to work in claws yet though I am working on moving everything away from gmail because fuck google!! Though my other accounts work in it just fine. Its a quite basic mail client so you often have to play around with different things to get accounts to work. Also tried evolution but it was too bloated but not nearly as bad as thunderbird.

lite-xl

I started using lite-xl because I wanted a editor that was simple but very configurable. Neovim and kate were my two favorite editors and lite-xl is kind of a mix of the two. It uses lua for its config files and has some really cool things like: a project structure to make it fit better for coding, support for all the major languages and lsp plugins.

lite-xl config

The config can be found in my dotfiles. On different screen sizes lite-xl may look bad and to fix it you need to set the LITE_SCALE environment variable.

My config has buttons for quickly opening a terminal and file explore in the current directory. It doesn't know what your defaults are for those apps so to set them just change the varibles in the "init.lua" file.

mpv

I switched to mpv because vlc was acting weird with audio sometimes when watching anime and nothing in this world is worse then something getting in the way of anime time! Just like lite-xl and neovim mpv uses lua for its config files and is really simple by default. It also can play youtube videos or other online streams just by giving it a url.

The config can be found here.

Liferea

Feed readers are one of those things I use on and off. A lot like mail clients feed readers tend to be very bloated. Liferea is my favorite but it has always had issues with nvidia drivers until I found out a trick.

If liferea has issues add this to your /etc/environment and reboot
WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1

Some cool tricks:

  • Get this plugin to find feeds easier.
  • You can turn youtube channels into rss feeds with https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={channel_id}
    This can be done for all your subscriptions with this script
  • You can drag and drop youtube urls from your feed reader into mpv so you can keep up with your subscriptions without even touching youtube's website.

Alacritty

I only started using it very recently because I been using kitty for a long time. I switched to alacritty because ssh in kitty is fucked up and I found out that alacritty now has a option for toml files for the config. The yml files was one of the biggest things keeping me away from alacritty.

You can find my config on the dotfiles repo.

zsh

zsh is pretty cool though I been playing with fish a bit and been thinking of switching to that. zsh has lots of cool things like vi keys and is somewhat compatable with bash to.

For my zsh config to work you need powerline and nerd fonts which can be installed with:

  • sudo dnf install powerline
  • Download a nerd font from the nerd fonts site. Personal I use hack font and configured neovim with it.

vim

For a long time I used neovim. I started using neovim becaues I wanted vim to act more like a ide and have fancy shit. For most things I ended up using lite-xl more because it did a better job doing all the fancy shit easier and smoother while still being a lite bloat free editor. Neovim ended up just being used for editing configs, quickly throwing together scripts, crazy vim wizard edits... so I decided to just ditch neovim (you can find my old config here) and instead go with a simple vimrc with only a few plugins.

My vimrc can be found here.

Emacs

Don't use emacs. Its stupido.

That is and will always be true but lately as of writing this I been bit by the emacs bug. Using emacs is so bad and so wrong but feels so good to use.