I’ve done a few things here and there this winter break. My law school career is coming to an end — I’ve just 1 more semester to go! Anyway, you can tell from this blog’s evolution that that I like to blog mostly about techie/geeky/nerd things like computer programming, linux, and the like. So that’s what I’ve been doing these days — my most precious, last real “winter break” before getting a job in the real world. Yes, I could work for someone — but I’m going to be working the rest of my life!
Some things I’ve done recently, or am getting into:
- I got rid of Xubuntu (gasp!) on my old laptop, and replaced it with Arch Linux, after hearing one rave review of it after another. This is the distro that has slowly and steadily climed up in popularity on DistroWatch, enough to rival and surpass Gentoo, while being similarly focused on simplicity and end-user configuration (not “factory defaults” like Ubuntu or Mint). The install and setup wasn’t so smooth, as the wikis and beginner guides were, though highly informative, not really comprehensive. But after I got it running — I too have been generally impressed with Arch, and the whole Arch community, and its pacman packaging system, along with the ABS/AUR duality for getting packages.
- I started learning text-based (aka “console” or CLI for command line interface) clients for many common things I do on the computer. So far I’ve managed to use and configure irssi for IRC, and I also use aria2 for bittorrent. I want to look into tmux (replacement for GNU Screen), alpine (email client), bitlbee (for AIM, MSN messaging from inside irssi), and clex (file manager). Why a sudden emphasis on console clients, instead of graphical ones based on GTK or KDE? Well, for one, text-based ones run faster, and are more stable. And once you set up text-based clients and have them configured properly, they are easier to use and are much more efficient time-wise to get the same thing done.
- I switched my default shell from bash to zsh. The tab-completion feature alone makes the switch worth it, in my opinion, as well as the somewhat-difficult-but-doable themeing of the prompt. There are tons and tons of features in zsh that are customizable (the man page for zsh is broken up into 17 sections!), that I will slowly start to learn as I get more and more into programming as a hobby (shell programming, to be more exact).
- I stopped using xfce4-terminal (aka “Terminal” in the XFCE desktop environment) because of its poor color support (it only has 16? colors) and, after a series of changes, finally settled on a custom, AUR-based package of urxvt (rxvt-unicode) that supports 256 colors. Now my vim looks virtually the same as my gvim using the zenburn theme. Yay!
- I started exploring other programming languages a little bit. So far, I’ve decided to get more into Haskell and Factor. Haskell has a reputation for being rock solid, from what I can glean from the blogs and news sites out there, while Factor is cute and interesting with its stack programming model. I also want to ditch Ruby and get into Python (I’m tired of writing “end” over and over again), so I’ll look into that more in the future (although, this would mean that I would have to rewrite my custom Rails app that I made last year using Django or something else, even — but I think the sacrifice would be worth it).
- I got back into practicing the guitar again — but this time focusing only on my classical guitar and playing older songs (not modern ones from rock bands) like the short pieces by Carcassi.
I’ll probably write the obligatory Arch Linux “first impressions” review in the future, from my unique experience of having switched from Linux Mint to Xubuntu to Arch Linux in the course of about 1 year, never having used Linux in the past. Was the switch to Arch worth it? Yes. I’ll explain as much as I can, and why you should also switch, in the review.
