welp, here i am, finally writing about my linux config. i have been tinkering away on my setup for quite a while now, ever since i installed Debian 12 on my pc in early 2024. i've used linux on and off since about 2011, trying out various distros on different devices. like many people, my first distro was ubuntu (probably ubuntu 10 point something i think?), installed on a late 90s pc my dad hadn't used for a decade. later, around 2018, i installed ubuntu on a very slow chromebook and used it for school and work. i kept using windows on my main pc for gaming purposes, but when i first tried out proton at the end of 2023, i was hooked!
a few months ago, after having used Debian almost exclusively for a year, i wiped my windows ssd clean and decided never to reinstall windows again, mostly because of microsoft's recent (and not-so-recent) shady behaviour. what really made linux click for me was when i figured out how realtime scheduling works with my cpu (and grub parameters), which allowed me to start making music without any hassle and, frankly, much more easily than on my windows setup. these days, i mostly make music on vcv rack and reaper, and i managed to get lower latencies on both using pipewire (compared to alsa on windows).
after more than a year on Debian, i've recently switched over to openSUSE Tumbleweed, simply because i got tired of bugs related to old packages on the Debian side. i think i prefer Debian's community and philosphy, but Tumbleweed has been great and relatively stable (i LOVE snapper).
i've been using the Sway compositor for the past year (see screenshot above). it was quite daunting to start using as someone who had only ever tried out full-fledged DEs before, but i quickly got the hang of it, and learned about all the little services one must enable by oneself when setting up a customized environment. i've tried out other compositors like Hyprland or dwl, but Hyprland is too fancy for me and dwl is too much of a hassle. Sway has been incredibly stable, snappy and easy to use compared to these other options. i actually like its lack of animations compared to DEs and Hyprland, and even though sometimes i wish it were more configurable, i haven't had quite as solid an experience on any other compositor. i have tried SwayFX, but having to check dependencies for it on a rolling release distro where it isn't packaged is a hassle as well.
my current config is themed with catppuccin frappe, my favourite colorscheme. trying to optimize accent colours and proportions in my waybar has been quite the process (my girlfriend loves to make fun of me for asking her opinion on tiny changes lol). the biggest problem i've had customizing Sway has been HiDPI. my monitor is 4K, which is amazing for a single-monitor setup, but boy is wayland difficult to configure for scaling. i COULD simply use Sway's built-in 1.5x scaling option, but that sadly doesn't play nice with xwayland apps, which get all blurry with fractional scaling (including games under proton). so i scale everything by text size options with nwg-look, which works quite well in most cases, but doesn't scale icons in many gtk and qt apps.
i've also tried many, many terminal emulators in the last year, and i can confidently say my favourite is foot, a wayland-only terminal emulator. it renders fonts using system settings and behaves in completely predictable ways, unlike alacritty or kitty (in my experience). and it is FAST. startup time is pretty important in a tiling environment, and alacritty and kitty just don't feel quite as snappy as foot. i had smaller annoyances with these two as well: for instance, i could never get colors to be displayed perfectly with transparency enabled, whereas the alpha setting in foot simply works as expected.
well, i suppose this has been a bit of a ramble! thank you for reading all the way through. i haven't even touched upon more specific areas of my dotfiles, like my doom emacs or neovim configs. stay tuned for more!