Tools and Tech I Use

I used Evil Mode and the Collection for a few years after switching from Vim to Emacs. It's really good though eventually I challenged myself to try actual Emacs keybinds and found a healthy balance with God Mode.

I like Vim and Neovim and used them a lot before I found out about Evil mode for Emacs.

My DE-hopping went something like this: Cinnamon (Mint) → XFCE (Xubuntu) → KDE (very briefly) → GNOME.

Similar to the above, my distro-hopping looked something like this: Mint → Arch → Ubuntu → Gentoo/NixOS → Guix.

Mint was my first real Linux experience, in fact I remember thinking the PC I had was only 32 bit (it wasn't) so for a while ran a 32-bit release of Mint. This might have been 2017-ish.

Arch I used because PCIe passthrough was the meta for Linux gaming circa 2020. I fell for the Arch BTW minimalism meme, though I learnt a lot through breaking and fixing my system every week.

I used Ubuntu after Arch because bleeding edge was a bit too hectic for me, for engineering here in the UK Ubuntu is standard issue so I use it daily. Ubuntu is fine.

Gentoo I liked using a lot for having a tightly customised system, though eventually I got bored of recompiling Firefox or webkit-gtk and distro-hopped to Guix.

I briefly tried Nix on a spare laptop while I used Gentoo on desktop and had a decent time. I didn't really get Nix the language though and thought the same idea using Scheme would suit me better so ended up on Guix.

Guix is alien technology from the future and (I hope) has put an end to my distro-hopping. I like Guix a lot.

VS Code is fine but I don't use it. It's just not Emacs. I notice now a lot of Engineers get frustrated when someone isn't using VS Code.

I grew up with Google Chrome because I'm a zoomer —it's fine but Firefox runs uBlock Origin flawlessly and Chrome now doesn't. I'm not bothered enough about benchmarks or Google account integration or AI to really need to use Chrome.

I've used Chromium and it's okay.

I used to have something written here but I think enough's been said about this. I dislike Windows and Office. Excel isn't totally bad. I have nostalgia for XP and Vista and 7.

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