I have returned to Linux and i3wm, and hopefully will be writing more posts!
I started using macOS almost five years ago. It has been a great journey so far. Its retina screen, font rendering, portability, the look and feel of the applications are great. However, lately, it has been in a regression in terms of speed and stability. The increasing number of errors, fan going of randomly, software force closing, touch bar stopping responding and many more things have made my love fade away for over a year, and I hate the new keyboard. (I know they fixed it in 2020 model) I still have to use it for my main work at Atlassian; however, I have recently built a great PC and started using Linux as my daily driver for over a month.
I have been using Linux for almost ten years, and recently Lubuntu because it was the closest thing I had to Windows XP. I also need Linux for my Ph.D. work, which focuses on Kubernetes schedulers, and working with VMs in macOS is too much a nuisance for me. I use Firecracker or QEMU to create VMs in seconds. Brew package manager in macOS is slow, and having a decent package manager and better CLI tooling available in seconds is exciting for me. You might wonder how often would a person be installing and removing packages, but once you get used to it, you feel the ability to tear up and down environments without relying on things like Docker.
I run Ubuntu 20.04 with i3wm. I never liked the SecureBoot, but Nvidia driver depending on it, was interesting to me, and I would probably have not noticed it was not properly loading if I was not using dual monitors. I still don’t get why the industry focused on developing UEFI and SecureBoot, while they were planting a backdoor called Intel Management Engine. I also bought an AMD (because I need many cores as possible), but of course, it’s management engine equivalent probably have lots of exploits. I chose Ubuntu because I was used to it, although I find rpm packaging far more superior, it’s more user friendly, and it helped me to setup SecureBoot properly. For some point in the future, I will probably be trying to install Arch Linux again and lose my Windows boot manager in a completely separate disk for some reason, because UEFI is complicated. Anyways, enough chit-chat for UEFI/SecureBoot.
I also have chosen to run i3wm from now on. I used to work with AwesomeWM and xmonad for a while; however, they required too much configuration, and I switched to LXDE on my previous laptop, and it was lovely. I will never forgive Ubuntu for changing Gnome 2 to Unity and large, 64x64 icons, but I never thoroughly liked Gnome3 either. I don’t think neither macOS or any Linux DE is providing a good user experience compared to Windows, but I don’t use Linux for media consumption or creation. I strictly keep my Linux environment development focused, and a tiling window manager like i3wm is keeping me focused and fast. I’m still trying to get used to keyboard shortcuts, and customizing it a little. Running it with dual monitors is a challenge, though. It can be confusing, but I bet someone out there is running i3wm with six monitors, and it’s just a matter of getting used to it.
I moved from Medium to my domain in the hopes of writing more. I also used to have mustafaak.in but now I want to use mustafakin.dev because people thought my name was Mustafa Ak, and I was some Indian guy, and someone, or probably bots signed me up for various Indian dating sites. I also like the .dev TLD a little more. I wanted to buy mustafaakin.com but the domain mafia did not accept 15$.
What I’ll be doing next? Well, I want to write more. I’m also focusing more on my Ph.D. work, and it involves some technical deep down on Kubernetes, cgroup, and some mathematical optimizations. I want to share the non-academic stuff with the rest of the world as I progress because working for something for many years, just to highly probably rejected by a journal, is a huge bummer, according to many friends who have left the academia. Therefore, I will share things like how the Pods are scheduled and the resources are shared, and how it is a challenge, and why you have phantom performance issues on Kubernetes that you cannot put a name on it. Stay tuned!