Okay, I got bored. Really bored. So what do all cool kids do when they’re bored? Change their OS, obviously 🙄. Yes, I changed my OS. Again. Which makes it the 4th time I’ve formatted my computer this year (excluding my Desktop format). I was running Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) for around 2 months when I felt it to be a bit heavy and a bit buggy. I also had only one partition of 2Tb size which I couldn’t really shrink into multiple partitions becuase I encrypted it with LUKS2. Everyone on the interwebs said the easiest and safest solution was to format the computer and reinstall the OS again.
I backed up my computer (1.5 hours) with duplicity, a great backup program which encrypts data and efficiently stores it using rsync. Who knows how much time and space it would have taken if I’d used anything else. Once everything was backed up, I was still in the mindset of installing Ubuntu 19.10 or Ubuntu 18.04.3; I still wasn’t sure. I asked a few online forums on their opinions and one person suggested elementary OS. I looked into it and it seemed pretty cool and it being an Ubuntu-based OS made it a compelling choice. However, like most decisions I make in life, I decided to go against all logic and install Fedora 31.
During the installation, I was really confused why the installation program was telling me my file systems should be xfs and not ext4. xfs is mainly used in servers and is usually meant when storing very large files, like in the order of Tb’s. It was only mid-installation when I realized my mistake. I was installing Fedora Server and not Fedora Workstation, the one meant for laptops/desktops. As a wise man once said, my disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined. I had to quit the installation, flash the right iso and then start… all over again 🤦♂️. 3 hours later, I was done. I finally had Fedora 31 (the right one) running.
However, it kept freezing for a few seconds every 5-10 minutes. That’s when I realized that Fedora was running on Wayland and not X11. So I switched over to X11 and everything worked seamlessly. The next few hours were just setting up my shell, theme, wallpaper, partitions and restoring my data (I very seriously love duplicity).
Once everything was set up, I decided to make my life even more miserable by insatlling i3, a tiling window manager. I’ve used i3 very briefly before and it went over my head that time. This time, I wanted my work to be as efficient as possible and that meant reducing my mouse interaction as much as possible (you do use your mouse in i3 occasionally, but it’s not that much).
Below is a screenshot of how i3 looks on my 2 monitor setup (casual flex).
i3 tiling window manager
I have a sweet desktop wallpaper
I also have a sweet lockscreen wallpaper: link to both
In other news, I finally put off watching the last season of The Big Bang Theory (no spoilers here) and watched it over the past few days. I’ve been watching it since 2013 (Season 7) and I guess I didn’t watch the final season because I didn’t want the show to end. As expected, the last episode made me feel sad. It made me feel sad because we’d never see Amy, Bernadette, Howard, Leonard, Penny, Raj and Sheldon on the screen again. These were the characters that I grew up with for 7 years and they had become a normal part of my living (I know it sounds very cheesy). Just thinking about never seeing them again made me feel a strange melancholy and an unnerving unease. To the characters, I bid you all aideu.
Okay, time to go work on TagThisBot. If I don’t finish the rest of it today, I never will. 