My messy desk working on setting up Fedora with Hyprland and Waybar
I’ve been living that motel life now for a couple months. While it is just a room, it is bigger, cleaner, and better for me all around.
I was able to salvage most of the important things from storage while we get that shutdown; ain’t nobody got money for that. This is 2025 and you need to take out a loan to buy a bottle of ketchup so spending $260 on a storage unit when you can barely afford to eat is absolutely not it.
Regardless, I grabbed all my NUCs, my old Dell Inspiron laptop, all my keyboards, and after tomorrow my PC parts. I am not sure when I’ll ever be able to afford another apartment, especially now, and I am not mentally capable of handling a job currently. Long story and not for this blog, anyhow. Ok, this post is about Linux, huh. Yeah, right.
Okay, back up
I mainly work on my M1 Mac Mini. It is a great machine, but like I’ve said on Mastodon, I am not going to be able to replace it when it dies. This means I need to find an alternative I feel comfortable with right now, learn it, and prepare to switch to it full time.
I am extremely lucky that I went full bore into sysadmin work for the past year and a half. It meant that I needed to go through with learning the terminal, terminal commands, and being comfortable with keyboard shortcuts and keybindings.
I also switched full time to Neovim using LazyVim wrapper and a couple of other TUIs, such as Yazi, fzf, and zoxide.
Writing code explicitly inside my terminal for the past 6 months has been a hard fought battle but now I can’t go back. Now that I have that skill, moving my work from macOS, with its unix underpinnings to Linux is not going to be as hard.
Distro Hopping
I’ve tried all the usual distros like Ubuntu and Debian. I also tried NixOS which didn’t quite fit my workflow.
Learning how Linux works takes a good amount of time and research. I only suggest switching to it if you meet the following criteria:
- You need to have a computer for work and can’t afford a Mac or a decent PC
- You have time to invest in learning about Desktop Environments, Distros, File Managers, and all the other necessary things to fully get a grip on Linux
- You hate Windows and are a masochist
Distro Hopping is advised against; you lose time and productivity when you do this. And now that I’ve got a system setup that I actually like, I refuse to hop unless I absolutely have to.
My current setup
On the Dell
Fedora 41 Workstation with GNOME Desktop
On Beelink NUC
Fedora 41 with KDE Plasma DE and Hyprland Tiling Window Manager.
Till next time
I’ll probably talk more about setting up Hyprland and all that is involved with that.