Linux

From day one on the Macbook I looked at how I could make this thing work for me in a way I was accustomed to. I come from Linux, a world of endless possibilities. In the 15+ years I used it as my main system, I got a certain workflow that was my own. People used to joke that I didn’t need to lock my laptop when I was away, as it was unusable to anyone else. I didn’t use a bar. A logged in system would show nothing but the wallpaper. Pressing the super (Windows) key did nothing. Right clicking the desktop did nothing. Sure, a Linux window manager user would press super + enter and they would be greeted by Kitty, my terminal emulator, but no Windows user would press that combination. ...

I don’t like a messy home. Home is where all your stuff lives and if you want to find something, it’s easier if there’s not a bunch of clutter in the way. This is true in your physical home and your digital $HOME. Most Linux distributions and macOS populate your $HOME with directories you never asked for. The difference is whether you can rid yourself of them. On Linux they come from xdg-user-dirs. You can remove or disable it, delete the directories, and they stay gone. macOS has no such switch: delete its home directories and the system quietly recreates them. So on the Mac you can’t remove them… but you can hide them. ...

LUKS, Linux Unified Key Setup, is a way to encrypt partitions on Linux. It’s a good way to store sensitive data on a flash drive or on your main system. Usage is super simple. You issue a command to unlock it and it will prompt you for your passphrase. After entering the right one, you can mount the partition and use it as normal. When you’re done with it, you umount the partition and lock it with another command. Without the right passphrase the data on the partition is just noise. ...

Typing takes time. Typing without typos is an art. Fixing mistakes in a terminal command is a pain in the neck. Luckily there’s such a thing as aliases. An alias lets you set a keyword and a command it should expand to. For example, I have set a super simple one, which is widely used: alias ..='cd ..'. This allows me to write .. in terminal and it will act like cd .., saving me typing a c, a d and a space. This seems minor, but when you imagine how often I need to go up a directory in terminal, it’s a huge timesaver. ...

Extracting archives is a pain on Linux. There are just so many types and so many programs to extract each type. A .tar.gz file is extracted using the program GNU tar, but for a .zip file, you’d need unzip. What’s that? You’ve got a .7z file? Yeah-no, can’t use either of the before mentioned extractors, you need 7-zip. Got a .rar, you’d need… well, you get the point. What’s more, some of these programs require flags you’ll need to use to actually extract an archive. For example, to extract a tar file, you might do something like tar xvf <filename>. For a 7z file though, it’d be 7z x <filename>. Other extraction programs don’t require flags at all though, just the name of the extraction program followed by the file to extract. This sounds simple enough, but wait… what was the name of the program to unzip .bz2 files again? ...

In many languages there’s a need to add decorations, or glyphs to characters, like for example é or č. These are called diacritics. These characters don’t exist on a US Standard qwerty keyboard. There is the US International version with dead keys, which allow for crafting these special characters by pressing the desired diacritic key followed by the character to apply it to. So for example pressing ~ followed by n results in an ñ. ...