The Joy of Tinkering
I've been busy lately. New house, kid, work, making the whole mess of the three survivable has taken almost every moment of my time available, and that's even before factoring in dinner. But now the kid sleeps alright and is not at peak toddler menace yet, the house has all big things to make it a home, and getting ready for a holiday, so even work is winding down. This all means that I finally have some time for one of my favourite things to do - tinker.
There is a certain zen in dealing with gizmos, widgets and gadgets, even more so when they are all digital, just the pure process of taking a few bits and bobs and mushing them together, until they bend to your will or you leave 80 tabs in a furry, which won't let you sleep, cause the problem-solving part of your brain comes with a self-inflicted suffering mode.
So, here I am, on a somewhat relaxed Friday night, booting up my PC to work on a thing that has been on ice since November, and the first thing I'm greeted with is a Windows update screen. Sure. Fine. Went, made some tea, and managed valiantly to browse just a few bsky posts, before the whole thing booted back up. Ok, lets start again - oh ... Driver updates, Windows Store updates, the fans in the case are letting me know this is serious business happening. Finally things have quieted down and I manage to open my browser, just to be faced by a massive AI prompt and a list of features that make my eyes glaze over. Tab closed, bookmarks for the project open, and on opening the trusted Notepad, the every trusty scratchpad for to-dos and random bits, I'm greeted by this thing in the corner.
At this point in my life I had been at peace with using Windows, it's still the OS I've spent the most of my time with and known the best, and there have been things in it that I actually really like - the new package manager, the new terminal, PowerToys, the immense utility of Powershell - but Linux is not a foreign land to me. As most nerds of a certain kind I've had a Thinkpad running Arch and working in tech it's hard to escape it server side. In the back of my mind is also my Steam Deck - a somewhat portable console made by Valve, that coincidentally also runs on Linux (with the familiar Arch flavour as well), that happens to run almost all the games I currently have on my machine. So being faced with this smug icon, the annoying take over of my homepage and the sound of my CPU doing something suspiciously in the background I've already made my decision that the other project can wait - this weekend we are going back to Linux.
First is research, which can be the most dangerous step in the tinkering process - a tar pit of a thousand competing options, never put to use, just endlessly evaluated and thought about. So for this to work out in a weekend I need at least some ground rules to prevent the option-paralysis. First, something Arch or Ubuntu based, since those are the 2 flavours I know the best and are in the top 3 for available information. Second, it can run games with little effort configuring it. And lastly I need to have it up and running before Saturday. And thus after a few visits of the usual haunts of the newly Linux-pilled like DistroWatch, various subreddits and asking around I ended up at CachyOS - an Arch setup, with some nice configuration options and a pretty good installer, with good docs.
Sidebar To the people managing distro sites - please, please, please actually tell me what's different in your project. So many sites of just we are X based and no explanation why I would be interested in what YOU specifically offer.
So equipped with a flash drive and freshly formatted disk I venture forth - surprisingly to me, outside of a single[1] sketchy default somewhere else, the whole thing took 15 minutes, most of which was loading from the ancient flash disk. So I'm now sitting at a working desktop, that is using the most of my monitor by default (cough Windows cough), has a built-in brightness control (COUGH Windows COUGH) and just feels so snappy and nice to use. After the initial excitement of just clicking boxes and things opening instantly, I go about rescuing my browser from the remaining Windows disk (worked for the most part), and opening Steam to test a few games. Again, after changing a single setting, everything just works - I threw at least 5 games at it, and had no issues.
At this point any normal person would crack a beer open and rest after a productive day evening, but I've felt the itch - I know there is more hiding behind this, cause I've seen it. Different windows managers crafting pretty grids out of colourful terminal windows, bars show you as much or as little as you want, a complex internal mechanism that makes all of this talk to each other and it's all there to be prodded and pocked and tinkered with. With all of this burning a hole in my head, I go to sleep restless.
Over the next 2 days, in between feeding a baby and running baby's laundry (the main baby output it seems) I'm browsing the same usual places for inspiration, ignoring the usual avalanche of anime wallpapers (some things are constant over the decades), and there are some beautiful things people have made. Not specifically things I would use or enjoy looking at all day, but undeniably beautiful workplaces made to reflect the people using them, filled with explanations of advanced wiring, custom tools and scripts and everyone's own particular choice of apps. And in the midst of all that I see this little demo, that just tickles something in my brain - I know this is what I want out of my setup. Having a starting point for this leg of my adventure I dive in deep into a mess of tabs from forums that look taken from the 00s (appreciative), wikis in an 8 point size and a thousand dicord[2] channels and emerge on the other end with an idea of a plan.
And I go at the plan - I set up the aforementioned window manager, I pick out a launcher, a notifications modal, I test a few editors, I wire their colours together based on my wallpaper, I craft some bar components, cause the ones I found were not exactly what I wanted, and during this whole thing I felt so damn happy to just be able to add and remove things, and test as things are running and not worry that the corporate gods might take my enjoyment of my machine as some frivolity that needs to be constrained and caged. In the end I could spend another two thousand words explaining all the bits I did and all the problems I encountered, but it's been ages since I've had the joy of just making things works and be unconcerned with costs or maintainability or whatever other business constrain shows its head in my work projects.
At this point I'm mostly happy with what I have built - not a perfect system by any means, but one that I cobbled together with the tinkering of others, be it as inspiration or as tools. And I know it won't last - I'll see another post and another thing that makes me want things to be better or does things in way I haven't even considered before. But that's the thing - for a while there I kept telling myself that having everything be boring and stable, and it led me be content for other people making choices for me, even despite knowing it could be better - now I at least I know that person is me and that I can make it better if wanted to. Hell, I will even enjoy it.
P.S: If you are annoyed at Windows and want to try Linux, you don't have to do everything the way I did, it's probably better if you don't if this specific type of tinkering is not for you. Put Ubuntu on a flash drive and just test it out - no need to install anything, just have a play around and see if it is something you can work with.
P.S.S: For the tech nerds OS: CachyOS WM: Niri Notifications: mako Launcher: fuzzel Browser: zen File browser(testing): yazi Editor(testing): helix Shell: nushell Prompt: oh-my-posh