Not sure if you’re the one to ask, but are there any good alternatives to Strava built on OSM? I don’t need all the fitness analysis and social features, I just want to track my walk route and get basic info like miles traveled, elevation change, average speed, etc

You are of course welcome to your opinion. Use whatever tools bring you joy. But I’m a huge fan of helix, and think zellij is great (though I prefer wezterm’s mux server when I can use it).

I don’t have any particular allegiance to rust, though once it’s set up, being able to install through cargo rather than being to figure out whatever package manager or build system is nice, especially on various HPC environments where I don’t have sudo.

Btop does look cool though

What I mean is that many of them have basically the same functionality with the same arguments. I don’t mean I have pristine memory for the differences, but things like alias ls="eza" is basically a drop in replacement with some added features. So when I’m on a server without it, everything is basically the same, just less fancy.

Helix and fd are an example of the other pattern - they are huge improvements over existing tools, to the point that when I’m forced to use the basic ones, I’m actively crippled. But as an argument not to use the better tool day-to-day, this doesn’t make sense to me. Why would I force myself to suffer 95% of the time to save myself from suffering 5% of the time?

I mean, for helix/vi it’s even clearer. Vanilla vi is basically unusable for me anyway, and I needed a huge number of plugins to be serviceable - on a basic cluster environment, I’m going to be crippled anyway, so…

they either don’t improve upon or add functionality that’s not available, or simply add eye candy. Gaining pretty colors is nice, but not worth losing familiarity with ubiquitous tools.

The thing I like about a lot of these is that I don’t lose familiarity with existing tools. When I end up on a cluster that doesn’t have them, I’m a bit annoyed, but I can still operate just fine.

The principle exception to this is actually fd - I now find find (har!) almost unusable without having a man page open in a separate terminal. But that’s because fd is so much more ergonomic and powerful, I would never give it up unless forced.

Yes. The only things I use regularly that aren’t aliased to or replaced by a rust-built tool are mkdir, ln, and rsync.

• cd: zoxide
• ls: eza
• cat: bat
• grep: ripgrep
• find: fd
• sed: sd
• du: dust
• top/htop: btm
• vi: helix
• tmux: zellij (or wezterm mux)
• diff: delta
• ps: procs

Probably some others I’m forgetting

Wow, reading that left me quite confused until I realized that it’s elder scrolls and not Buddhism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(time)

Your point stands regardless 😅

Oops, thanks for the heads up! No idea where that came from

9 times out of 10, what I want is tldr (https://tldr.sh/). There are a bunch of terminal interfaces for it, I use tealdeer.

That’s fair. Another example of what you describe that I’m more familiar with is Epic (medical records software). My hypothesis is that the differences that matter are:

1. Cost of switching is higher and/or
2. The people making the decision (business manager, hospital admin) are farther from the actual users of the software.

Could be lots of other reasons too, but these are the ones that jump out at me.

Really the only thing that I miss on Linux is creative cloud stuff. Yeah, gimp and inkscape cover 80% of the functionality of PS and Illustrator right out of the gate, and I bet I could get to 90% if I sank a bunch of hours into learning the differences. Which is amazing for open source software.

But there’s a gap when you have a team of dedicated and highly paid developers and hordes of creatives testing everything out and demanding progress that’s going to be hard to overcome.

That’s basically how I use desktop files generally, the kde launch menu (similar to the old Windows “start”… I don’t know what it’s called) comes up when I tap super, and then I can start typing and find what I want to launch.

You can set that up to run custom scripts, but all desktop files are there by default.

Normally running a command does execute a binary.

I’m not certain, but I’m wondering if OP means that new programs don’t automatically get a “desktop” app or whatever. I’m often annoyed when I have to manually create the file that lets me access software from the launch menu

I’ve also got a gazelle, nearly 5 years old - no complaints! I occasionally need to use it on battery and it’s pretty power hungry, but if you turn off Nvidia graphics for those times, it’s quite a bit better.

You said a bunch of things you like about cinnamon, and nothing that you don’t. Is there something motivating you to switch?