A couple of weeks full-time in Linux. How’s it going?

TL;DR It’s a love/hate thing, with love in the lead.

Here are a few thoughts on how things are going so far.

I’m still using Omarchy. I really like the tiling window setup with Hyprland. I sometimes paint myself into a corner, but mostly it makes window management fast and efficient. Workspaces on Linux are so nice.

Everything on Omarchy can be done via keyboard. Once I got used to the bindings, this has made getting around, launching apps, moving windows, etc. convenient. I’m not against using a mouse, but It’s nice not to have to.

So far almost everything has worked without fuss. My Apple Studio Display works, as does its speaker volume, webcam, and microphone. I was able to print to my laser printer straight away, and never needed to install anything for it.

Speaking of installing things, using the little TUI wrapper over Pacman and the AUR is a dream. Launch the TUI, type part of the name of the app to install, and hit Return. Done. No app store, no DMGs to extract. Homebrew on macOS is pretty good, but it’s not as all-inclusive and consistent.

Mostly what I like so far about Linux is how I feel about using it. I like the feeling of “Hmm, what can I do with my computer, today” rather than, “I wonder what Apple is going to allow me to do with my computer, today.” Running Linux on this completely repairable and upgrade-able Framework laptop, I feel a sense of agency. It’s a good feeling.

That agency, however, comes with responsibility. I’m completely in charge, here. That means when things don’t work right (and sometimes things don’t work right), it’s on me to figure out some obscure way to fix it. I don’t know where anything is, yet. Thankfully, things have been working fine, but inevitably there’ll be some weird issue with the boot loader or Bluetooth will just quit working for no reason. That’s when the parts of Linux I don’t like will start.

I miss some things from the Mac. I miss BBEdit, Tinderbox, PopClip, DEVONthink, and others. I miss my photography workflow. Photo management and editing software on Linux is powerful, but it’s not fun to use. At all. When doing any significant photo management, I switch to the Mac for now. I don’t know if that will ever change. Capture One, Lightroom, and Photoshop are just too good.

Mostly, I miss having the standard Emacs bindings everywhere. It’s driving me nuts to type this post in a web browser, for example. How do people deal with text like this. Arrow keys? Gross. I just want C-f, C-b, C-a, C-e, C-n, and C-p, is all.

All I know is that I’m having a lot of fun right now.