distro hopping
Some light laptop and OS rambling for end of year.
I like distro hopping a lot. Usually I will try at least one new Linux flavor per year. I started with OpenSUSE, moved to Mint, then Ubuntu 12 came, tried some Fedora in different flavors inbetween, obviously Arch because you have to do that experience and then Manjaro, tried some "hacking" with Kali (which is probably the most fun I had with Linux and I swear when I have enough money to retire I'm gonna abuse the shit out of it). This time it was time for Omarchy - a lot of fuss around. I liked the looks and vibe around it - lots of people even trying Linux for the first time with it (brave choice), so I obviously had to try it. And since it's Arch it's a special needs system - not something I currently have time for, so after playing with it for a good week I just went back to Ubuntu.
Since I also switched to a new daily work laptop, I may as well write down some of my thinking around the whole laptop and distro choice.
People have very different workspace arrangements, some use a single home workstation, but I currently tend to switch between a single ultrawide monitor on my office desk, a few random TVs when meeting and collaborating and if I work from home, I don't plug in the monitor at all anymore and just work on the laptop from couch.
Some wisdom I picked up over the years is that Macs have great battery life - I'm always impressed when I have to do the ios builds from the spare Mac I have, that battery bar there does not move. To bad I can't stand MacOS ecosystem. Another thing I learned is also that if you don't want a Mac, you buy a Thinkpad - I hated every single other laptop I had - there is just something about Thinkpads that clicks for me (keyboard).
So battery life and Thinkpad in mind, I did a short research and ended up with T14s gen 6 with Intel chip and a low-power 60hz monitor and 32gb ram. This works perfectly for me since I only code on this laptop, I don't see any benefit in more hz other than battery drain. Internet people say ~20h battery life - I've got ~11h out doing common daily work running two dev servers on hot reload and running some music in background. For me this is solid - tbh anything above 8 is great.
So getting back to the OS - after trying Omarchy for a week I was not really seeing any benefit over the good old Ubuntu. Most of the stuff that I wanted to have out of the box require manual configuration/changing dotfiles and personally I just find that a waste of time - I used to do that for years when I had time and wanted to learn the ways of Linux - now I just want to run it. Ricing is fun, but I can do that on any distro - but tweaking monitor configs and other basic features that should just work when I have tons of other more productive work to do is not an option. I spend most of my time between terminal, IDE and browser anyway, so I often don't even get to see anything else for days.
Anyway, Ubuntu LTS is up and running - this time fingerprint reader works without any driver or tweak which is a first (I always try to set it up and until now it never worked first try). The system is smooth and every single device works out of the box. Obviously over the weekend I riced it to a minimal look through tweaks and Gnome extensions, but Yaru theme is beautiful and I decided to not change it and just picked the Viridian flavor and a nice wallpaper to fit with it - a must.
I always install Guake as my terminal and rebind the trigger key to cedilla (one key to the left of "1"), because it reminds me of old Action Quake console and I just love the dropdown overlay + I can read docs underneath through it's transparency.
I also always reconfigure all the OS navigation shortcuts to my personal liking so workspaces management is more manageable and I don't use a tiling window manager - basic Ubuntu tiling is good enough for me to split window to half-screen and move it left/right/up/down. I prefer to alt-tab (and func-tab which is my shortcut to switch between workspaces). Specially when working on laptop I find tiling to get in the way and prefer to see the entire app/terminal/window. IDE already has multiple sub-sections and I split the terminal many times too - so tiling wm is not so useful to me. They look cool in screenshots and on r/unixporn though, love seeing those.
Also a must to run is:
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.tiling-assistant enable-tiling-popup "false"
To disable the Ubuntu 24 "select window to fill" feature when using super + left/right - I absolutely hate it - it's a horrible UX. Credit to Medo64 on how to do that.
I also want to comment on snaps - everybody hates on those and I also don't really praise them because I did have issues in past (Firefox upload input not working - then again Firefox is becoming trash so not sure who to blame), but I also don't see them getting in the way - the startup time delay is unnoticeable and I hope that they managed to fix some of the issues that were reported in older versions. I'm not much of an app user, but for Discord that constantly bugs with updates I kinda like to have it running as snap and autoupdate.
I may expand more rambling here if I come up with it - it's not December yet.
Take care of your favorite distro.