Yeah, theres a lot of old old laptops which make no sense to run. But there's a growing crop of more recent used devices that are only being sold off because they don't support Windows 11, and the power efficiency story changes there. The OOP mentions "8.1 lappies"; my main laptop has a 15W 8th gen which is only in the last year starting to feel less appropriate for desktop use. (And honestly, a RAM and storage bump will probably get me another couple years.)

For environmental concerns, youve got to tax new devices with manufacturing costs as well.

100% agree about VMs though.

Not as cursed as

print("eovdedn"[n%2::2]) 

I don't fit into any of those categories.

Its obtuse, old, and doesn't have a lot of functionality of modern code editors

Obtuse? Yeah. The keyboard focus means natural discoverability is low. But I immediately preferred modal editing once I learned it.

Old? Eh, most people use Neovim nowadays and write plugins in lua. Even in OG Vim, Vim9script broke compatibility for a better dev experience.

Functionality? Out of the box, it is just a text editor. But only VSCode might have a more active plugin ecosystem. ALE has been a thing for ages if it's LSP support you're looking for.

It's not better, it's not worse, I'm not in any way superior for using it, but I love it for a reason.

I put newlines in my filenames to break both CLI tools and Windows filesystems

zsh-syntax-highlighting

There's also a fork called fast-syntax-highlighting, I use it.

Select the color which matches the steps before filenames ((non-)login and (non-)interactive), then follow that arrow the rest of the way. There's more colors in Bash because Bash makes a distinction between remote and local shells.

Another way to look at the same data for Zsh (note: $ZDOTDIR will be used instead of $HOME if it's defined at any step along the way):

One confusion on the Bash side of the diagram is that you see branching paths into ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile and ~/.bash_login. Bash will use for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and execute only the first one that exists and is readable.

I have it on Steam Deck since it can be launched with a CLI argument to force a 1280x800 window.

Vivaldi pretends to be Edge when visiting Bing to unlock GPT-4, and prefer that to Edge on my other devices. (Secondary to Firefox, ofc)

Thought I'd check on the Linux source tree tar. zstd -19 vs lzma -9:

❯ ls -lh
total 1,6G
-rw-r--r-- 1 pmo pmo 1,4G Sep 13 22:16 linux-6.6-rc1.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 pmo pmo 128M Sep 13 22:16 linux-6.6-rc1.tar.lzma
-rw-r--r-- 1 pmo pmo 138M Sep 13 22:16 linux-6.6-rc1.tar.zst

About +8% compared to lzma. Decompression time though:

zstd -d -k -T0 *.zst  0,68s user 0,46s system 162% cpu 0,700 total
lzma -d -k -T0 *.lzma  4,75s user 0,51s system 99% cpu 5,274 total

Yeah, I'm going with zstd all the way.

It requires a phone number to log in. That already kills any hope for anonymity. I use it to message family and close friends, of which the fact that I'm messaging them is not surprising.

I'm pretty sure both are possible in xkb. But you'll have to learn how to get a custom xkb_keymap into your DE of choice. I only learned enough to do one mapping:

xkb_keymap {
	xkb_keycodes  { include "evdev+aliases(qwerty)" };
	xkb_types     { include "complete" };
	xkb_compat    { include "complete" };
	xkb_symbols   {
		include "pc+us+inet(evdev)"
		key  {
			type= "TWO_LEVEL",
			symbols[Group1] = [  Multi_key,                Caps_Lock ],
			actions[Group1] = [ NoAction(), LockMods(modifiers=Lock) ]
		};
		key  {[ Escape ]};
	};
	xkb_geometry  { include "pc(pc105)" };
};

This remaps Capslock to Escape, Escape to Compose, and Shift+Escape to Capslock. Not what you want, but hopefully this will give you a starting point to playing/breaking xkb.

Another benefit of doing this with xkb: it's now a separate codebase from X.org, and is used in every Wayland compositor I know of.

Excuse me, OCI container, we're a runtime-agnostic family here.

If you're asking for CLI or shell help in particular, I'm a mod at !shell@programming.dev and !commandline@programming.dev and we'd welcome it there. But those aren't as big as this community.