The Grand Unified Settings Theory

This isn't an explanation of any particular distribution's features but my opinions; all my opinions on various programs are collected here.

Gentoo + Dwm 😊 (I run dwm/st/dmenu with nothing but source edits, no patches)

0. Documentation

Basically, and personally, my broad preferences come down to how well something is documented.

For example,

• For distributions, the old Gentoo wiki, the current Arch wiki
• For window managers, Xmonad
• For terminals, kitty, which even has separate documentation just for its config
• For color themes, Dracula or Nord

I prefer things that are well documented like these.

1. Minimalism

Complexity breeds bugs. Unless it's a feature I particularly like, I prefer a simple and minimal approach wherever possible (a fun, philosophical conference talk about simplicity). That's simply because it fits my philosophy, not because it's unconditionally the right direction that everyone must follow.

-. Licenses

I don't strictly require GPL, but I don't go out of my way to use proprietary software either.

Trying hard to stick to GPL + MIT + BSD + Apache licenses

-. Consistency

Unless you really want to build everything around a different language, setups like

• LISP: GuixSD + EXWM + Emacs
• Haskell: (NixOS) + Xmonad
• Lua: (ANY) + Awesome + NeoVIM
• C: (ANY) + DWM + ST + Surf

are also possible, but it's not a criterion I pursue that far right now.

0. Before We Begin

systemd doesn't affect my choice much. Honestly, I'm not very interested in the init system debate. I find the Editor War (vim vs emacs) or the indentation war (Tab vs Spaces) way more fun.

Choosing a distribution has been so hard for me personally that I've applied criteria so peculiar and picky that I'm embarrassed to tell other people about them.

1. It must be an independent distribution

A criterion I can't give up

Ubuntu is out because it's based on Debian

Mint is out because it's based on Ubuntu

Suse is out because it began as a Slackware-based distribution

The RedHat family and Fedora are out because each was based on the other at some point

Artix, Manjaro, EndeavourOS, etc. are out because they're based on Arch Linux

→ Survivors: Gentoo, Solus, Arch, Debian, Void, Venom, KISS, CRUX, LFS, NixOS

2. The original creator must still be around

Gentoo: Daniel Robbins ran away and made Funtoo

Solus: the original creator bailed too

Arch: Judd Vinet got busy and bailed too

Debian: Ian Murdock's suicide

Void: the creator went silent, then tried to come back but was kicked out

→ Survivors: Venom, KISS, CRUX, GUIX, LFS, NixOS

3. Proprietary software support

For example, whether Google Chrome or Visual Studio Code is supported

Important, because I don't use Linux for ‘philosophy (Only Free and Open Source)’ reasons

→ Survivors: NixOS (LFS???, CRUX???)

→ Didn't meet the earlier criteria but worth noting

• Arch (has the AUR)
• Gentoo (the official repository has nearly everything)
• FreeBSD (same)

4. The package manager must have a clean name

Even I think this is going too far; anyway

→ Survivors

• NixOS : nix ← doesn't follow the FHS, so installing extensions for vscode etc. gets needlessly tricky ugh
• LFS has no package manager at all. Realistically unusable T_T

→ Didn't meet the earlier criteria but worth noting

• FreeBSD → pkg : but with FreeBSD, watching Netflix (no DRM support) is a problem
• Alpine → apk : but it's mainly meant for the cloud, which is a problem

First, let's talk about this one → ArchLinux

A family member had to be hospitalized, so I was packing my laptop, and after agonizing until that very morning, the one I reached for was Arch. Yep. You can install it in 10 minutes lol

• Pros

  1. It's a rolling release, so I don't have to agonize over whether to just do a fresh install at every point release
  2. AUR: so convenient when I want to sync vscode and google-chrome
  3. I know it inside out, so learning anything else is too much of a hassle;

• Cons ← the reasons I kept agonizing until the very end

  As pointed out under the old criteria

  1. The creator no longer maintains it ← You might wonder what the problem is, but personally I dislike it because the philosophy the distribution was originally designed with can gradually fall apart. Looking at how Volkerding of Slackware is still developing it as BDFL, you can guess that the reasons and philosophy behind Slackware are being preserved very well. The same goes for de Raadt of OpenBSD.
  2. ‘That’ criterion people might curse me for: the package manager name.. pacman.. hmm.. FreeBSD has pkg!!

Then why not just use FreeBSD?

1. Have you seen the 802.11ac support status page?

Most WiFi chipsets aren't supported. In other words, if you want to use FreeBSD on a typical laptop, a WiFi dongle is a must. The problem isn't that they ‘won't’ develop it because of FOSS philosophy, but that development is ‘slow’. They're short on developers and actively need help.

2. WiFi isn't the only problem; even getting graphics working on a 2019 laptop was hard. I eventually failed.

Meanwhile, on OpenBSD, with no extra commands or package installs, it detected the APU, found and installed the firmware on its own, and Xorg came right up. Wow.

Then why not just use OpenBSD??

The package manager names.. pkg_add to install, pkg_info -Q to search, pkg_add -U to update???? Not using it!

With cons this obvious, why agonize at all?

Because it's the ‘root (根本)’ UNIX.

What's wrong with GuixSD??

GuixSD (called Guix System since 2019) is really good. On top of that, a package manager and operating system made with guile, a dialect of scheme, which is in the lisp family, wow, insane. All system configuration can be done in lisp lololol

Add EXWM and you can build a full Emacs environment lol

But!

1. As a GNU distribution, it has very strict FSF standards. Things you'd wonder about don't get ported either. For example, there's no firefox.
   1. Of course, you can install it with non-guix (firefox)
   2. Of course, you can install even more with flatpak (chrome, vscode)
2. And the kernel: it uses linux-libre with GNU Hurd as the end goal, and the init system isn't systemd (I wouldn't even ask for that), nor openrc or SysV, but GNU Shepherd
   1. Of course, the regular linux kernel can be installed with non-guix
   2. Of course, non-free firmware blobs can also be installed with non-guix

One way or another, it's a hassle to have to tinker separately to get things working that just work on other distributions (Arch, Nix)..

And I have a very minor extra complaint

1. emacs support is so good that the config files I put up here become hard to sync with the outside world. Sure, it doesn't matter if I just use use-package, but then why use Guix??…
2. As expected, user count is king. ibus-hangul v1.5.3, wow… As of August 30, 2022, when I wrote this, v1.5.4 was released on August 23, 2020, a whole two years earlier, wow.. ("Then why don't you bump the version yourself??" is a fair point. Agreed.)

What's wrong with Nix??

Managing vscode extensions is rough, because as a functional package manager it doesn't follow the FHS.

Still, I have to note that nix-shell is unbeatable for quickly setting up development environments

Another touchy point is that it keeps warning you not to change stateVersion, whether it's 20.03 or 21.05, for now. I understand the reason, but in a declarative distribution, I really dislike seeing a version variable fixed to the year and month of installation.

Option variable names changing (exfat-utils → exfat) is another thing; overall it seems like it'll be good to use once it matures more.

Functional package managers and distributions

In conclusion, I think they'll take back the top spot over time.

Arch Linux

The Python of distributions

So good for quickly spinning something up and testing

Takes 10 minutes to install, tops

Gentoo Linux

The C of distributions

Void Linux

The Haskell of distributions

Very attractive, but nobody uses it, so it's a hassle to use (especially package version bumps)

Crux Linux

???

LFS, BLFS

The ASM of distributions books

Ubuntu

Isn't this totally Objective-C? lololol

Debian

The C++ of distributions

Slackware

The Fortran of distributions

Fedora

The Java of distributions, part 1

CentOS

The Java of distributions, part 2

RHEL

The Java of distributions, part 3

OpenSUSE

The C# of distributions

Still, it gets 0.01 extra points for having a rolling release

Leap for fixed release, Tumbleweed for rolling release

But they've fought among themselves over whether the Tumbleweed update command is $zypper up or $zypper dup lolol

NixOS

This is the future, so I guess I could call it the Rust of distributions, wow

It's actually Nix itself lolol

GuixSD

Lisp itself lolol

But disguised as Guile and lying in ambush

Gnome

There no longer seems to be any reason to prefer Plasma or XFCE

That said, Gnome Terminal ligature support, please.. I'm begging T_T Konsole has it T_T I don't want to install a separate terminal just for looks.. 🤔

The comfortable thing about preferring Gnome is that most distributions ship Gnome as the default, more or less lol

Plasma

However, if you particularly like Plasma, your choices shrink. Or become a pro and run it on ArchLinux or Gentoo. Though, compiling Plasma-meta on Gentoo, just thinking about it, wow

XFCE

It used to be an ancient, musty desktop environment, but after an unexpected large-scale update it became sleek lol

Cinnamon/Mate

For grandmas

I don't mean it's bad. It's very comfortable. Nothing to tweak

Especially if you use one of the two via the Linux Mint editions, it's almost Windows-level lol

Budgie

It came out of Evolve OS, the distribution was renamed Solus, and then Solus faded away, leaving behind only the masterpiece called Budgie lolol (Solus came back to life in 2023, and Budgie now lives on its own as Buddies of Budgie.)

Before getting into window managers, and especially editors, I want to talk about key remapping.

VIM's use of h, j, k, l and switching modes with esc, and even ~ coming to mean home on Unix, all come from the ADM-3A terminal.

In particular, if you use something like a programmable 40% keyboard, moving the current TAB to ESC and CAPS LOCK to CTRL can prevent a repetitive strain injury (RSI) like the so-called emacs pinky.

The compositor is picom, of course. compton is now deprecated.

DWM

• Minimal

EXWM

Emacs!! Lisp!!

• No need to choose a terminal
• No need to agonize over bash vs zsh vs fish
• Of course, you'll most likely end up using picom
• Depending on your choice, you might use a status bar like polybar
• But alas.. single-threaded..

BSPWM

• Really only does the window manager's job
• So it needs sxhkd for key bindings

Xmonad

• Haskell!!

i3

No gaps support (until 4.22, in 2023: gaps are built in now)

But plenty of people ask why you'd even use gaps. Then just use a DE. Lots of people use a WM because they don't want to waste screen space, so they don't understand gaps.

Anyway, for gaps you used to install a fork called i3-gaps; it's no longer needed.

Sway

Hmm, so with wayland you don't need picom 🤔

Hmm, but the video driver side is a bit lacking 🤔

Awesome

Lua!!

NeoVIM is Lua too!! United under Lua!!

Dmenu

Maybe the most successful child of Suckless;; (in the order dmenu > dwm > st > surf?)

Rofi

Seems to be the most popular replacement for people who find Dmenu too plain

Polybar

Does everything

Lemonbar

Haven't tried it yet

sh

Wow…

Zsh

oh-my-zsh

prompt → pure

Fish

There was the POSIX compatibility controversy lolol

Csh

Smells like BSD, part 1

Ksh

Smells like BSD, part 2

Dash

Ubuntu's shell

Bash

Smells like the default

I no longer edit my config directly; I just use the best-documented bundle.

NeoVIM → AstroNvim, LunarVim, etc.

Emacs → take a look at Doom Emacs, etc.

Helix

Rust is the best!

NeoVIM

United under Lua!!

Or so I said, but while happily using neovim, it occurred to me that I must really dislike fork projects. Even when I ssh into a server for the first time, the fact that I can fly around in the default vim doesn't change, so I gave up on neovim and just use vim if it's installed on the system.

• Reason 1: aliasing vim → nvim is just too much of a hassle. Especially for someone like me who keeps hopping between distributions and reinstalling things, it's even more of a hassle
• Reason 2: I have to additionally alias vim in the root environment, or install vim separately at the system level (for example, vim in NixOS configuration.nix, and neovim in home-manager, like this), which is a hassle
• Reason 3: in the end, I don't like the direction of vim development either, but I'm also uneasy about neovim, the community-developed one with neo- in front

Vim

is everywhere.

That said, ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME} support, please… grr

Emacs

is everything, but not an editor

If you can delete a line with dd in vim, in emacs it's C-a C-k lolol

If you can insert a blank line below the cursor with o in vim, in emacs it's C-e C-j lolol

If you can insert a blank line above the cursor with O in vim, in emacs it's C-a C-j C-p lolol

(reference)

My style is to keep plugins to a minimum, but for actual editing, maybe I need evil?

Visual Studio Code

Money is king.

st

Having to patch in even basic features is such a hassle..

urxvtc

rxvt-unicode a.k.a urxvt, with daemon feature

alacritty

Users love it, citing that it's written in rust

Ligature support, requested since January 5, 2017, still isn't there, yet the issue thread was treated as spam and closed (?)

kitty

Critics hate it, citing that it's written in python

There are issues with the remote server connection feature. The creator's reaction (1, 2) is, wow, not much different from alacritty, wow

Termite

Haven't tried it, and now there's no need: it was archived in 2021 (its author points to alacritty)

Whatever terminal you use, when some characters break into boxes, it's usually a font problem rather than a problem with the terminal itself (of course, in hardcore cases like st, it'd be a patch problem; but anyone reading this already knows that;)

So here are commands for a basic emoji test and Unicode test.

## Emoji
$ curl https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-test.txt

## Unicode
$ curl https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt

• If some icons don't show up properly → use a patched font (link)
• If some Unicode (foreign languages) doesn't show up properly → use DejaVu Fonts (link)
• Keep the font you want as your main font and set the above as fallback fonts. (link)

Nerd Fonts

Nerd Fonts

Berkeley Mono

(Paid, link)

The base pack alone is good, but for some icon support I patched it with nerd fonts → font patcher: see NFM below

BerkeleyMono NFM

(Personal, Patched)

Can't upload it anywhere because of the license

Icons were added, but the base font doesn't support some ligatures has since been updated. So installing Fira Code below or FiraCode NFM from nerd fonts is even better

Fira Sans, Fira Code

Fantasque Sans Mono

Font Awesome

IBM Plex

Personally, I like its Korean font too (IBM Plex Sans KR)

JetBrains Mono

Powerline

Nord

Well.. but Nord is the pretty one lol (link)

If I use the Nord theme on ArchLinux, I install the following from the AUR lol

• Nord-KDE
• Nord-GTK
• Nord-Icons
• Nord-Konsole

Solarized

by. Ethan Schoonover

the root of it all (link) but nobody seems to use it much these days lol

More about it

Modus

light: operandi, dark: viviendi

by. Protesilaos Stavrou (website, YouTube)

Ahh.. the root of Emacs? (link)

Dracula

(link)

Gruvbox

ProtonMail

Try building your own email server at least once! You'll feel grateful to Gmail! lololol

Ah! Not a framework lol I mean setting up Postfix + Dovecot + SpamAssassin + OpenDKIM lolol

• Once you start using a PM, I recommend turning off saving passwords, payment methods, and addresses in your web browser in particular.
• Using a PM doesn't make you safe; if anything, it concentrates the attack target in one place. So you must defend it at all costs with a long master password + 2FA + biometrics, etc.

Bitwarden

• The first one I tried, and I use it because it's the best

1password

• Haven't used it

LastPass

• Haven't used it

Aegis

GPL

Namecheap

Cafe24

For .kr domains (.kr, .co.kr and so on), a Korean registrar like this one is the usual choice

Vultr

Has a Seoul region, close to me

Linode

Digital Ocean

It had no Seoul region when I was deciding between it and Vultr, which is what decided it for me.

Cloudflare