quartz/content/Projects/my-computer.md

title	tags
My Computer	productivity linux difficulty-moderate

Hardware

First off, I don’t believe in having more than one personal computer, as I think it’s wasteful, especially when your profession will provide you with an e-waste work laptop whether you like it or not. As such, I’m an eGPU apologist! My setup consists of a laptop connected to a Thunderbolt dock on one tb4 controller and an NVIDIA eGPU on the other. Speaking of…

Laptop

• Framework Laptop, Batch 6
  • Repairable, upgradeable, and wholly yours. This thing is amazing.
  • I got in just early enough to be an "early adopter", but late enough that I was past the teething problems.
  • CPU: i5-1135g7
  • RAM: 2x16gb of Taiwan’s finest 3200MHz
  • SSD: 2tb gen3
  • Expansion Cards:
    • 1x 3D printed and custom magnetic charger adapter
    • 3x usb-c, to be swapped with any of usb-a, hdmi, microSD, or storage as needed So yeah, it’s pretty cool. Here are my peripherals:

Dock

• Razer Thunderbolt 4 Dock (non-Chroma)
  • A buncha ports in one place. Really solid DAC for the headphones too, better than the onboard.

eGPU

• ADT-Link R43SG-TB3
  • It was smaller than a core x chroma
• Dell DA-2
  • eBay’s finest
• GTX1650
  • Upgrade Soon(tm), it’s really not good. I’ll probably go to the power limit of the DA-2, so like a 3060ti or so

OS/Configuration

I run Fedora Linux with the GNOME desktop environment. I was a longtime Windows 10 user, and dabbled in Linux a bit, but eventually got fed up enough with Windows that I swapped for good.

Previously, I’ve also daily driven Linux Mint. You can read more about my history with Linux on on-linux.

On User Interface

I’ve daily driven XFCE, Budgie, Unity, and KDE before. No DE really caught my eye in a way that feels both intuitive and productive until GNOME. The overview is such a neat concept that’s performant, useful for rapid task switching, and pretty. I recommend the Blur My Shell extension for best results, as well as an extension that gives you trackpad gestures for your windowing system.

• Little tip for productivity: if you use gestures, throw each new window on a different workspace and swipe instead of alt-tabbing.

Config!

I use a bare git repository to backup all my small configuration files that are scattered throughout my computer.

• Sidebar: I deviated from the tutorial and called my alias dots instead of config. It just felt better and there was no chance of confusion with Fedora's configure system utility.

Config Hell

• There are a lot of little tweaks I do to software to make it fully useful to me, which is the one argument I’ve ever raised against compartmentalizing through Flatpak, Snap, etc.
  • I have a bunch of Flatpak programs with absolutely no settings sync or remotely near the capability to sync, so what do I do when I want to migrate?
• Hey kids wanna see a dead husk of a man? Come find me three hours after I update my Neovim install. Dear lord, that thing breaks OFTEN.