Tech Over Tea - Taking A Philosophical Stance On Linux | Uğur Erdem Seyfi

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

A while back I did a video on a blog post called Linux Asceticism and today we have its author on the show to chat about it, and just Linux in general. ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson ==========Guest Links========== Linux Asceticism Post: https://www.rugu.dev/en/blog/linux-asceticism/ Blog: https://www.rugu.dev/en/blog/ ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson. And today, we have the author of that Linux asceticism post on the podcast. You may have seen it on Hacker News, maybe on Reddit, or you may have seen my video on it. I thought it was a really good post, so I decided to reach out to the author. And yeah, here he is. How about you introduce yourself, and then we can sort of just go from there. Yeah, here he is. How about you introduce yourself and then we can sort of just go from there. Yeah, sure. But like before introducing myself, I would also like to like give a quick disclaimer if it's also okay for you.

Go ahead. Yeah. like english is not my first language so like although i'm confident in my written communication and all those stuff stuff like when it comes to speaking i like still struggle a lot and this is mostly due to like it's not possible to stop think and refactor the things that you will say the way you can do it in a written communication. So I'm also not very used to this kind of like spontaneous kind of talking setting. So I will most likely mispronounce things or sometimes stop while trying to order or translate things in my mind. So I just wanted to let the audience

to know about this situation. Because this will likely happen so that they can adjust their expectations. But that's all. I can continue about the introduction parts if you like. Well, that's actually... It's always kind of funny when I talk to someone who... Who English is their second language, because there's a funny mix. Because you have some people who... You know, English is their second language, but, you know,

there are people that have a second language, but it's kind of like a second native language, where they've been speaking it since they were very young, and to them, there's not even an issue either way. They can speak in one language, let's say English or French or English and German, and to them, it's the exact same thing. But then there's people who are less confident in it. But I find with the people who are less confident, people who acknowledge that they're less confident, I find are actually a lot better at English than they seem to think they are. Yeah, probably. That can also be the case, but in my case, it's not i i was a bit hesitant like so i actually do want to hear more about your thoughts on when it comes to writing english

versus speaking it because you did say in our email exchange that you find it a lot easier to be able to yeah sit down with your thoughts and rearrange things and restructure things you find that a lot easier as a way to communicate exactly like and i think that's mostly due to that you are having more time to reconfigure your thoughts and paraphrase the stuff, get some grammar help, maybe use some translation tools and so on. But when you are speaking directly, it's more like you are forced to say things at an instant which is kind of like the opposite of thinking for long times and etc but like both have their advantages and disadvantages like it's easier to have a conversation flowing like that kind of an experience when you are speaking compared to reading text like you

cannot argue each other you cannot interrupt and so one thing i do find with it maybe it's not everyone but what i do see with the difference with people who are native speakers versus those who feel like they're a lot less confident is you often see native speakers doing that same not really knowing what to say on the fly and they end up filling the dead air with like ums and ahs they don't want to they don't want to be silent for any length of time they just want to keep making noise whilst they're trying to work out what they're trying to say. Whereas, at least from, you know,

the five minutes we've been talking so far, I noticed that you don't seem to try to fill that dead air. You will take that time to... Maybe later on you will. I don't know. At least so far, you seem to at least try to put more thought into what you're saying

because as you were saying, you aren't necessarily certain on the next word that you need to say. Yeah, exactly. Like, that's the part that makes it hard, I guess. Well, actually, one thing I do want to ask before we go into like the main topic, what is your native language? Like my native language is Turkish. And I also see that, like, people sometimes have struggle pronouncing my name, Uğur, like it's kind of like yogurt, but without Y t like over kind of stuff but when i see your name

english doesn't have uh like uh what are they called the the uh english like like the g yeah yeah yeah um so whenever i see that whether it's in yeah yeah yeah um so whenever i see that whether it's in whether it's for a turkish name or any other language my brain kind of just falls apart because the only the only word that we use in english that at least i can think of off the top of my head that has that is resume which we just borrowed from french but most people don't type that they just write it as resume because they don't have that that symbol on their keyboard yeah i mean it makes it hard sometimes to let to know the people that i'm talking how to pronounce my name but like i like it overall like both of my names they are both somehow related to stoicism which is related to linux assetism essay like uur means something like fortune and erdem means like

virtue the most essential thing in stoicism so yeah well let's get right into the um the the blog post then for anyone who sure hasn't read it, can you give a, I guess, a brief overview of the point you were trying to make with it and what it's about? Yeah, yeah. Linux asceticism and it was basically the result of missing a possible connection between two concepts that I was already interested in. And I tried to relate them to each other. The first concept is ascetic philosophies of living that affected my worldviews like stoicism, epicureanism and so on. And like the second is the operating system that I use like Linux. And the idea is that most of the practices that you do when using a like minimal kind of Linux distribution actually like uh aligns really well with what stoics and other Greek philosophies of living would call ask

cases like the discipline practices that are done for the pursuit of like uh self-improvements uh, self improvements. So when I, when I talked about this, there was a very mixed response. I haven't really looked deep into the hacker news thread or the, the, the Reddit thread either,

but there was a lot of people who thought this seemed kind of like a joke. Like what is this post supposed to be and then other people who i think kind of understood the point you were getting at but then thought well if this is the goal you're trying to achieve couldn't you go further with it because what distro did you say you are NixOS right now? Yeah I started out with Arch Linux like few years before three years or so and now I am using NixOS. I am not I am not very experienced though like but I just tried to express my express a connection that i saw that could be interesting to some well i saw some

people saying well if this is the idea you're going for why don't you do say linux from scratch for example or yeah yeah you can completely completely do that as well like when you think about this way though there is no stopping point. You can just throw out your computer and do all this stuff. And I think it's perfectly okay to do Linux from scratch as well. For me, it's kind of contextual. We also have things to do, chores to do. We have deadlines, all these sort of stuff. Like we also have things to do, like chores to do. We have deadlines, all these sort of stuff.

And the AskCases parties for me is a bonus that I really like to do on my free time. So if I'm given free time enough, sure. I would like to do all of those stuff as well. Like, yeah, like there is nothing wrong with them, if you ask me. Right. You're trying to take in some of these practices, but you're not, you know, taking a full Buddhist monk lifestyle, sacrificing all of your worldly possessions to focus only on using Linux. Yeah, yeah, of course.

So like one problem, one possible problem with that essay was that I wrote it in a very casual way, like in a very short period of time, like while traveling from one city to another. short period of time, like while traveling from one city to another. So like I never expected to reach such a large audience, at least like at least large for me. And after like seeing some misunderstandings about it, like I felt like I could have explained things in much more detail, but it was already posted back then. So I know that essay might be a bit shallow for those who are expecting a deeper connection between the concepts. But it was something that I have done just for maybe fun or something like that.

Have you considered re-approaching the topic and doing more of a deep dive um yeah maybe i can write about it in the future as well like uh i also like maybe i can add some sort of an addendum kind of stuff in the essay and so on like when you think about there seem to be lots of connections between these kind of unrelated seeming topics but once once you know those it becomes easier to connect them and stuff like that well we already talked about one of the misunderstandings that people had where they sort of thought that if this is the idea you want why don't you go like all the way yeah yeah but what was some of the other misunderstandings that you came across

i mean like um maybe about the meaning of asceticism, you will most likely see these philosophies of schools like Stoicism, Epicureanism being mentioned but you also see some like religions like islam christianity judaism buddhism like what else there is like hinduism and so on and i think this is where uh confusions may start to arise like although all these religions or schools of thought can be considered to ascetic like the concept of asceticism itself isn't necessarily like owned by them. Like, yeah, I think that's one of the problems. Like, I think as long as your worldview includes voluntarily facing uncomfortable situations

for whatever reason, like it can be considered to be ascetic, I guess guess like whether this is done for redemption salvation spirituality or just to be self-sufficient like this was the case for me like this is a whole another question so in the essay what i had that i tried to use the word aesthetic like for the purpose of improving yourself learning things to become more capable of using things it's kind of like working out like going to gym like we have talked this about you like when you started it kind of sucks but as you get used to them like the things that first struggled uh you becomes very easy like you start to feel

easy doing them your comfort zone kind of gets broaden expands so yeah like i think we can think of asceticism like as the group of philosophies of school like that embrace challenges but not necessarily something religious or stuff like that right right when you try to without directly explaining the concept yourself when you direct people to other resources most of those resources are going to approach it from that that theological stance because that's the general way it is approached from when you mentioned like challenging yourself with the gym I don't know much about Turkey are saunas popular in Turkey or not can you repeat the question Are saunas popular in Turkey?

What's that exactly? A sauna where it's a room where it gets really hot and you basically sit in there and just sweat for a while. Oh, sauna. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It exists in Turkey. The Australian accent might make it hard to understand. Yes. It exists in Turkey. The Australian accent might make it hard to understand as well.

Yes. It exists in Turkey. Are they popular in Turkey? I'm not sure if they're not. I am not sure whether they are popular because I don't know how popular they are in other countries. But there are people going to them like regularly. So I guess it's something um available right okay

the the point i was getting at there just so we're clear on the concept of it if there are any words where i say it weirdly and you're not sure what i'm saying feel free to ask uh there's a very good chance we we understand what we're both, you just don't understand my accent. Yeah, same goes also for you, like, ask me. The point I was gonna get at though is, I try to, usually one of my days of going to the gym is just go... What's that that's a giant moth jesus okay well that's fine um he's just gonna chill in the room um i get okay one of the days ago to the gym i try to go to the sauna and I will usually try to do about 40 minutes on that day.

And no matter how many times you do it, yet... I might need to find some bug spray. Can it just like sit still? Okay, yeah, chill on the light. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, okay. sit still okay yeah chill on the light yeah that's fine okay okay um no matter how many times you go it sucks every time but you know that this is the thing that you do it is part of your schedule yeah yes there is certainly a meditative state to it and a relax uh a relaxation state to it but ultimately it's just

going to suck and a lot of people feel the same way about working their legs at the gym a lot of people really don't like doing leg weights uh it feels like yeah for anyone who doesn't go to the gym when you do legs it's a lot worse than arms. When you do heavy weights on your legs, it can feel like your entire body is being drained of energy. If you go hard enough, you will feel sick. Not being able to walk out of the gym is a very unpleasant experience when you do arms like yeah your arms might feel kind of kind of weak and like wobbly but when your legs feel wobbly it's a much much worse experience but it's something you have to do it's it's part of your routine and it's gonna suck,

but you need to do it. It's good for you, just do it. Exactly. Like when you do leg days, it gives you a strong foundation to do other movements as well. Like, yes, like the delayed onset muscle soreness and all those stuffs really sucks but in the end like it really

make things easier for your life like functionally like if you don't use your legs property properly like uh glutes properly all those stuff like they are in blunts imbalanced or so. Like it's also very probable that these imbalances also cause some imbalances in other parts like your back. And so, yeah, so same goes for maybe Linux as well, understanding the fundamentals and all those stuff. And one thing I've heard some people say is when you learn how to struggle at one thing it makes the struggle of other things easier yeah yeah like i also heard stuff like if you go into flow state in one area like you also become more likely to be, get better at other areas

as well, because you already experienced that kind of state of mind. Like, yeah, I think what you said totally makes sense. So I guess we can get into the way you're actually approaching Linux because as you've said, the blog post you have here is relatively surface level with both the philosophical side but also with the actual way that you are using Linux. You do mention that you're using Arch Linux

and now NixOS but you didn't really get into sort of the kinds of tools you're working with, the way you approach your system, and just generally what you're trying to get out of your system. Sure, like in the essay, I talked about us cases, like improving yourself as well. But like in none of the points, like I said something like this is the whole reason or something like that. Like for me, it was a good bonus that like further motivates

me, but there are also like reasons such as Linux being free, like you basically don't need to pay anything, like Linux being customizable, like it allows you to do things as the way that you like to do. Like there are also these more like ideological sites, like open source software and stuff like that, which I also find really virtuous. Exactly. I think like one thing that first motivated me to like switch to Linux was actually like more like a combination of many reasons rather than like a single one. Like I was already considering to switch to Arch Linux

when I was using Windows. And like, I believed it would actually force me to learn more and more. And could we make me more efficient in the end? Like this is not only like something like AskSSS also, but it's also pragmatic approach, I mean. And I also had a friend like Osama and he was obsessed with free and open source software,

security and so on. And he would always try to convince me to use Linux. Like to give you a short idea, like he was basically using this meta operating system called Cubo S and he was spanning Linux sandboxes in it and so on, like the opposites way I approach software like minimalism and stuff. But he was actually taking more like a ideological

perspective and most of his ideas were actually sound to me like but i was just avoiding the initial cost like uh i was lazy but but but i found all these arguments sounds like the things that you were mentioning. But what was the last straw for me was something like, I also met another person. Like his GitHub name is something like GWN, like three letters. And he was using Linux in the startup I was working for. And the first time I saw him working on stuff, I liked his workflow. I immediately thought I want to be as as fast as efficient like this guy and all he was using was simple tools like a new vim like a tool called dvtm to multiplex shell sessions like it's like

tmax but a lot less suckless alternative like he was using of course many different Unix utilities which I don't remember exactly and he was also typing very fast like he was cool and like all other developers who were in our team that were using macOS or Windows wasn't even like if you would ask me how fast productive is this guy, like it's weird but it was this way. And it wasn't like he was shipping bad code to become fast or like he was actually like very obsessed with the code products he was writing. Like he would aggressively delete unnecessary code

would preach simplicity, educate the team on how to use Git and stuff like that. So this was the final straw for me. And after that, I went to my friend Osama and he helped me. We together set up my Arch Linux computer and we basically have gone through the Arch wiki while doing so like we didn't use anything like Arch installer like that and after we have experimented with that like I also installed Archinux by myself after that experience for many times. And it worked great for me overall. People complain about how it sometimes breaks and so on. It

happened to me a few times, some program would break and so on. But overall, it was a really stable experience for me once I get used to it. Do you remember how long ago you started using Linux? Like, yeah. We can separate my Linux experience as my blind Linux experience and the serious one. Like if you think about the blind experience, like my first introduction to Linux just goes back to when I was around 10 or so.

Okay. But it was something like I broke my computer and then I had to share my cousin's computer, which had Ubuntu installed in it. And I wasn't aware that the OS, like that I wasn't aware that I was using Ubuntu. And, but- Do you know what version that would have been back then?

I don't remember exactly, but like I remember playing some open source games in it's in Lero. It was like Worms, but in real time, you shoot each other and stuff. And other than that, I was mostly playing games on browser. So that was my first experience. But I don't count it as a real experience. Like I eventually ended up using Windows again, like when my parents got fixed my computer. Like so my series.

Yeah. You were just using it as a computer. You didn't know what it was. Yeah. Yeah. I was basically forced to use it because my own computer got broken. And the interesting thing is that my cousin was also trying to convince me to use Linux when I was 10 or so. And it would have been great if I just did that.

Like I would probably be a lot better developer than I am now. But yeah, so the serious like the things I mentioned about my friends, the one who is more ideological one and the one who is practical, the coders kind of guy like. older kind of guy. That period was around three years before or so. We can say that I've been using Arch Linux three years before or so, and I tried to use it the minimal way the first time i started to use it and i constructed my own environment from bottom to up like instead of using kde and then deleting stuff like that like and i thought like

it was very educating for me like i still don't know a lot of things about my system and so on but like my even even done like my understanding expands so much i really appreciate it i appreciate it was there any specific reason why you went with arch linux or was that because your friend was the inspiration for it? Were you just not really sure that anything else was around? I guess it was basically due to the ones, the people whom I saw using Linux was using Arch Linux and like those were influential people. And I like, I would find their thoughts inspirational. I would like to be like them.

And so that was kind of the reason. And I guess if you would ask me right now, which operating system shall I give it to you? It wouldn't matter to me that much right now but like if you give arch to me like i would still configure the things i as as i want them to be like if you would give deviant to me i would probably install mix in it and use home manager to still make the things function as i want them to be or so like i would get what i want regardless of like those maybe if i go something lower level

than arch then it might change like i might have some struggle and so on but like as of now it doesn't matter for me that much i may even use desktop and mine like i don't see why i should right now because everything i have is sufficient for me but uh yeah that's sort of how i feel when people ask me why don't you use Fedora or whatever other Ubuntu or anything else? When I get asked that, I think, well, what am I going to run on that distro? And then basically all I'm doing is just recreating Arch Linux. Just, I don't have the AUI. That would be the only difference. Yeah. And I guess that's cool if that's what you like, if you really care about the package manager you have.

But at least for me, if Arch Linux suddenly said, we're getting rid of Pac-Man, we're going to use DNF, we're going to use Apt, nothing would really change for me. I don't really care about that specific thing yeah if you are someone who wants a more customized experience out of the box something where you're trying to you know install it on a business machine and you're not trying to use it as a hobby

machine i absolutely understand the value of going with something like a Fedora or an Ubuntu, but at least for what I'm doing, I would just be redoing exactly what I've done again. And at least for me, I just... Maybe there'll be a learning experience there, but besides that, I just don't really see any reason to use one of those systems. Yeah, yeah.

And I also share this feeling on when it comes to tools like choosing your window manager and etc like nowadays there is this window manager called hyperland which runs on wayland but and it's it's really cool like it's tempting me to use it but like i also feel like okay but i already set up my environment like dwm and it works so like yeah it would be cool to use that but i'm also fine right now so i was gonna ask you what window manager you're using so oh yeah yeah like we can talk about that. Are you heavy on patch usage in DWM or is it a fairly clean experience? Honestly, I didn't patch anything on my DWM.

I used the bare minimal one. I just attached some keyb bindings and that's all. Like it's DWM out of the box. And I like to use programs like out of the box. I like programs that doesn't need many configuration. Like even with NeoVim, I don't like myself having too long configurations and stuff like that, which I have like that long configuration right now, which I don't like this very much. But even with NeoVim, I would rather rather would like to simplify my configuration even further. Like the reason why I use like for terminal multiplexer, the reason why I use a tool called Zelish or maybe Zelij.

Like I don't know how it's pronounced. Z-E-L-L-I-J. z e l l i j silly oh it's an alternative to t-max written by the rust guys so like the only reason why i prefer over that t-Max is that it comes with more sane key bindings by default. And it's also customizable, et cetera. There's also that. But for me, a tool working out of the box is also a good thing. Once you understand what it does and stuff like that.

Before ZeliJ, I was using this tool called dvtm like it's kind of like a terminal multiplexer but it's more suckless in the way that it doesn't like handle uh session management part like for that you usually use other tools like detach or gnu not gnu screen maybe but like abduko or stuff like that. So I was using those stuff. And then after getting used to them, like I was like, man like what I am doing, like you need patches so that your mouse scroll works in this dbtm tool.

Like, but with Tmax or ZLAJ, you get more features. Like maybe it's more bloatedated but you get what you want in the end and you always understood what these two were about and so so yeah i think linux bloat is a very interesting topic that i i've heard a lot of people discuss and people will talk about something having more functionality as being bloated but the way that i look at it is if you're using that functionality yeah i wouldn't call that bloat i bloat is the extra things that you don't need that just happen to come along with it a good example of this is exactly when i installed my right now i'm running kde plasma 6 and a lot of people

said why didn't you install the entire application suite and all of these other little packages why did you just go with just installing plasma and then little things along the way and my my basic idea is i don't really care about most of Plasma anything that is a hard dependency of Plasma that it needs to function correctly should be coming with that package now turns out there's some things that don't

and that's raised some issues that I've discussed with some KDE people but I don't need the file manager or their random web browser that is barely updated or these random other things yeah I have my own tooling like uh KDE has a built-in application launcher I don't use that because i have a perfectly good application launcher i'm gonna keep using that one which one do you use as application right now i'm using toffee which is a

wayland rewrite of d menu yeah i saw that once like for me i use a tool called d menu run like it uses d menu under the hood like it's a really good another another really good software like i also use dmenu to like get passwords like get uh templates to my clipboard like i have written many scripts using that is exactly the reason why i don't want to get rid of toffee toffee takes in data in the exact same way that d menu does so when i was on x11 i had written a lot of scripts like my browser bookmarks it aren't in my browser i have a script outside of it that will open them inside of a browser so if i want to change from firefox to brave or chromium i can just swap my environment variable points to and all of a sudden those browser bookmarks just work on

another browser and there's other just random little things i have that it's it's very convenient to just have a menu that takes in new line separated data there is a lot of things you can control that with if you're willing to write a little bit of wrapper script around it to add that functionality. Exactly. And it's very simple. As long as you know what you want to achieve, like how you get password from password store, for example, as long as you know this, you can then just write a simple script that lists the available files and pipe it to the menu and pipe it to the actual program that you would like the thing that you selected to run on and like everything would just work fine and i really

like uh that little tool like it's really good the only reason that i don't use d menu anymore is because on wayland the way that uh a window can tell the desktop that it always wants to appear appear on the top is different so d menu acts like a regular window so sometimes it might appear behind things and that's just inconvenient whereas with toffee and other of these rewrites of d menu they make use of the protocol that will say always appear on top and it just works like i'd expect otherwise i would still just be using dmenu because there's nothing wrong with it it it's perfectly fine otherwise exactly like i feel uh the same about the tool like you mentioned like as long as it gets the thing done in a non-blotted

way and by non-blotted i mean with as few as as features as you need like everything is fine a bit before you mentioned that you feel that your neo vim config has way too much in it what yeah what's in it that you would like to get rid of that you feel like is kind of excessive um that's a good question. And like right now, I'm not sure whether I would like to get rid of them, but if there was a way to like reduce the lines of code or stuff like that, I would appreciate that. But like the things I am using with my new configuration is like, like base. So basically like I set up my LSP configs so that I get this syntax highlighting or warnings, like you are writing this thing wrong, et cetera,

kind of things. And even this is something relatively new. for like a few months ago, like until few months ago or so. Like even this is something relatively new, but I am like, I like the LSPs and it's nice having them. Like, like I have some plugins by this guy called T-pop. Like he's one of the most common plugin writers I have some plugins by this guy called T-Pop. He's one of the most common plugin writers in the Neovim ecosystem. For commenting stuff and surrounding text, kind of simple plugins.

I also have some few plugins that make my Neovim look nicer, like changing themes, coloring, and so on. If I would delete them, I wouldn't lose anything, for example. But I just keep them so that my NeoVim feels cozy and stuff like that. And the most bloated plugin I probably have, I wouldn't call it bloated because I use it, I like it like it's called telescope like it's written by another person yeah yeah what is that like uh do you know fcf like fuzzy finding yeah yeah so they basically built something in new vim that uses fcf under the hood to like open files and to uh do something like like finding the files with certain text like this kind of stuff yeah i there used to be another

plugin i think it i want to say it was just called fcf nvim or something like that which did a similar thing to that but yeah i guess that's a that's just a newer more oh it's it's written in lower okay so it's it's one built from the ground up for near vim that makes sense yeah yeah so i am not sure about whether i need this program or not because even before using this like I already had a shell Elias that uses FCF to open files in the current editor that I was using. What I would was basically just type E and press. E was Elias for edits and when I press it, it would list the files that i could open in new him but having having a easy way to open things in new vim itself is also good like

the the way i was doing before was opening things from shell like not in new york on shell, not in NeoVim. So besides using DWM, DMenu and NeoVim, what other applications do you find yourself using? Do you maybe use a terminal file manager or do you find Unix commands to be more suitable or are there other things that are kind of notable? Yeah, like as of now, like i am opening my mix config to see the things that i am using like so that i can remember remember them easily like yeah like s3 terminal terminal user interface file manager manager like i use lf like i was using a tool

called ranger before and i don't exactly remember why i stopped using that like maybe i just switched to LF because it was written in Go. Like, I don't know. The reason I swapped from Ranger to LF is I just didn't care about a lot of the default Ranger functionality. And I could just add to LF the random things I needed. Oh, yeah, yeah. add to lf the random things i needed oh yeah yeah i i guess the same thing about um default key bindings also holds true for lf so this was probably the reason why i left ranger i remember that in ranger i had to do some configuration for some stuff but in lf i didn't to do so so that was the reason i switched to it and there is this

tiny script lf underscore cd to just use lf to be able to change directory easily like you don't need to open stuff like that i also have that kind of stuff. Like I have, I use some Unix tools to make things easier for me. Like there is this called, there is this tool called fast, like D it's basically uses, it basically tracks the CD comments that you have used and remembers how frequently you go into directory and so on. For example, my blog post is in a folder called development, in a folder called Rugu, in a

folder called content, in a folder called blog, in a folder called English, in a folder called development, in a folder called Rugu, in a folder called content, in a folder called blog, in a folder called English, in a folder called and then files. So instead of writing this over and over again, I just write something like z space blog enter. And it just opens the blog folder like that I mentioned. So I find this very useful. Of course, I am using tools like Grab, AUK, stuff like that. Instead of Grab, I use a tool called GripGrab,

which applies certain flags that you would have need to apply in grep. Like it applies those by default. I use a tool called Enter, like NTR, like NTR to sometimes I instead of using a hot reloader or stuff like that like you can manually want to watch some file and do based on the changes and stuff there is this package called more utilities which which I really like it has these very cool um tools in it like it's written by one guy it has for example tools like wipe maybe you had heard it's wipe no I'm I hadn't heard of this package before I guess I get it's gets his this name from Vim and pipe, like wipe is a tool in more utils. And when you write wipe, the things that you write is piped to standard output.

And it also gets the things from standard input. So it's really useful putting it uh between the comments sometimes if you find it more comfortable to manually edit like text from vim but you also wanted to pipe to another program like and it also had many other cool features like more utils, like it also had p, like you probably saw it, like ydir, vdir, like it opens a vim and you change the file names there and then it applies, like Like these kind of stuff. So what else I have? Like I have Pandoc, I have tree, like RL rep. Like sometimes I don't know why, but certain programs like SQLite, CLI tool,

like when you enter the shell and when it overwrites your default read line settings, like you lose your ability to use the key bindings and all those stuff in the shell that is opened like in those tools, like for that kind kind of purposes there is this tool called RL rep like stands for read line rep I use that um like I use standard Network utilities stuff like that FFM pack for cutting videos or stuff like that and And other than that, I think everything is normal programs. Like maybe for note taking, I also sometimes use Obsidian or LogSec. Yeah, I use LogSec to take like notes about more...

How do you say it? It's like... I use Logsec to take notes on things that is not exactly like... I can't find the words like unstructured notes. Like I know it relates to something, but I don't know where to put it. So I just write my note and put tag and it makes the relation stuff for me. And I use Obsidian like for the things that I want to write if they have these images and complex outlines and stuff like that but most of the time I use neovim like instead of Obsidian anyways for taking notes yeah all of my yeah taking for my videos I just do with Vim wiki people say obsidians grade log sector and I've heard really good things about them but at least for me Vim wiki

it it's a absolute mess I've got things laid out everywhere I am the only one you can ever find anything in my notes but it was i also use it like win wiki for a while but like i had there was some problem problems uh inserting images and so on and i didn't want to install another plugin for that sure like yeah but for simple stuff, I always go with NeoVim. If it gets complicated, I start to use Obsidian or LogSec. And to sync between devices, I use this tool called SyncThing. Like it's a really good tool. Before that, I was using Git. So yeah, I guess this pretty much covers it.

So do you ever find yourself wanting to try out some of the I guess bigger desktops or bigger application suites? Because you said you're on DWM? Yeah, yeah. application suites because you said you're on dwf yeah yeah have you ever felt like maybe kde would also be something nice to try or something else like that yeah like for me it's kind of a kind of like a hobby to try new things out there and so on and i would also like to see how it feels to have this full desktop environments and so on but like right now I don't see any need for it so like I might postpone this task for a while but it's not something bad at all when I started using Linux I started on i3 then I tried yeah WM and then I did awesome Then I tried BSPWM. And then I did AwesomeWM.

And BSPWM especially is a really big learning experience. Because for anyone who doesn't know. That is basically as bare bones of a window manager as you can get. Because by default it doesn't generate a config. So you launch it and you have a black screen that is all no key bindings nothing at all you open it and then you swap ttys and then you kill the the window manager and you start writing your config yeah Yeah, like I recently helped my friend installing like Ubuntu or so, and there was some problem regarding the display manager and for some reason it would stack in a loop and so, and

he would get confused what the hell was happening or so. And we would like, I told him to press Control-Alt-F2, stuff like that, and just delete the GNOME desktop display manager with light, yeah, or stuff like that. Like even Ubuntu has this kind of problems. So, yeah. I've never... I know if you're using a laptop,

it's a good idea to have a display manager because you want to be able to lock your system. But for my desktop computer, I have never had a reason to run a display manager. I just... When I want to start my system, I log in from the TTY and I just have a script that will automatically start

whatever desktop I want to be on. I would also write startx, and it would use my configuration in xinitrc file. Like, I don't know how it's done in Valence, because I haven't used it, but... Usually, you just run the binary for the desktop itself. Sometimes, with a desktop environment, because there more a lot of other things you want to start it'll usually require some general startup script but if we're

talking something like Sway or Hyperland you just run Hyperland and Hyperland starts and then in the Hyperland config that's where you usually start up the rest of the stuff like the portal or if you want a bar or other things like that. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense.

So it basically acts like Stardex. It's just done in a different location. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understood. by the way um like i'm asking this because i don't know like why did you decide to switch to wayland like would you recommend it to me like so there's a couple of reasons why the main reason is wayland right now is just the new and exciting thing and i kind of want to see it as it goes when i first started using wayland it was very shortly after screen capturing became possible with obs so a couple of years ago at this point because before that point if you wanted to screen capture

you there were tools for it but there were specific smaller tools i capture everything with obs because it just makes it easier to edit things as like you i don't need to i don't need to move my camera in a video editor i can just do it by here as things are improving and be able to experience them as they happen basically rather than rather than just reading about oh this has been added and that has been added i want to be here as they're added and basically just you know if something is wrong hopefully be able to point out where something's gone wrong as well and besides that i i would have struggled to recommend waylander people maybe two or three years ago. I think it's in a very different state now,

and it's going to depend on your specific use case. If you're someone who very much relies on screen readers and hotkey daemons and tools like that, readers and hotkey daemons and tools like that right now it's still in a very very rough state you can, on things like

life land there are workarounds for stuff, especially when it comes to hotkey daemons but it's not perfect for my use case, I don't have a reason to go back to X.Org. Everything that I want to do

works perfectly under Weyland at this point. Now, that could be... Granted, that could also be that maybe my position is kind of biased because I want Weyland to be a good experience, so I avoid things where they could be possibly causing issues but at least up until this point I haven't experienced anything in quite a while where I've really felt the desire to go back to x11 I see. For me, the only concern that I have about X is that people sometimes tell that Wayland is going to kill it and stuff like that.

It's being outdated or it's not being maintained and stuff like that. But other than that, right now it gets the work done for me. And that's the main reason I use it. But I may switch into Wayland in the future as well, like if things stop working for me in X. This is the kind of mindset I have right now. But there is also this aspect of, like you have mentioned, experiencing things as they

develop like it kind of teaches you other things as well like seeing the things like from first eye is very different from reading like you have said so maybe like if the feeling kicks in, maybe I just dump X and Vela. It's just a matter of a sudden rise in how I feel or stuff like that. Well, I don't expect... It's in kind of a weird state because I do expect the distros like fedora and ubuntu to completely drop x11 as a package or xorg as a package yeah relatively shortly i i know from some insider discussion from some things they've hinted at ub Ubuntu really wants to get rid of Xorg from their repos and KDE and Gnome are kind of in a good state for that

but right now the smaller desktops like Cinnamon and i3 and things like that, Xfce is another example, they kind of are holding it back. So they're kind of being pushed along to hurry up with their whaling stuff i would expect the big desktops like katie and gnome probably within i would say within three years to if not completely drop x11 support very much discourage it put it behind a compilation option so it's just not going to be enabled by default and when that happens then i would expect especially for dora because they they tend to do things fairly quickly to end up dropping it as well or if not completely removing it moving it over to their third-party repos um as for Arch Linux though, and Gen 2 and things like that, and NixOS in that camp as well, whilst they might move fairly quickly,

they also don't tend to get rid of things fairly quickly. So, Xorg's probably gonna be around in the repos for a long time, because I don't expect Arch to drop DWM from the repos, or I guess you probably want to install DWM by compiling it, but i3 from the repos, or OrsonWM from the repos. And even if it does happen, right, it's still going to be on the AUR. And we're not going to be in a position where there's legitimate problems running X.Org. At least for the foreseeable future. We will get to a point where there's less interest in fixing it as bugs are discovered.

But if you're comfortable on X.Org right now, there's no major rush to leave it. Unless you're on Gnome and KDE where there is actually an impending removal of X.org support. So yeah, it seems like for me the main motivator to try Wayland would be to try something like Hyperland or so, but other than that, I guess it's fine for me as of now. Well, you can always try it and if you're not happy with it, you can just delete the package. Yeah, of course. With NixOS, it's especially easier, I guess, to try new stuff like that. Because there is this single source of truth kind of a layers thing between your system

and you. And it's just as easy as to remove some lines of configuration so that your environment is not cluttered and stuff like that so one of the things that you sent me in the uh the the topics you wanted to talk about was this idea of stupid light yeah yeah so i had a brief read of the the post here and I think it's an interesting point being made. Exactly. I guess, can you just give a brief summary of the idea that's being talked about here? So, yeah. Like, I actually really like software minimalism, like even right now, as of now I am using like two tools from Suclus, like DWM, D-Menu run and like that.

Like I still try to get things done in my terminal Unix environment, if I can do it in an easy way. And so far this approach functioned as I want it to be, without any problems. And I think this is probably due to these programs being really simple tools. They try to achieve one thing at a time like in simple ways and you don't get new updates or stuff like that that introduce those new problems to be fixed later on and like maybe this is because these tools aren't being built with the like mentality of trying to please everyone like so that you get some sort of stability like so like there is obviously a virtue approaching software this

way like minimalism way but like like there seem to be all so certain like dangers of this approach like sure using complex solutions to problems that could be solved simply is just that but i think what's even worse is to have like programs that doesn't solve what they are supposed to solve like i think it's a really common pitfall that many of many of us like including myself like we can fall into this pitfall of trying to achieve this simplicity goal but then having a software that doesn't solve the problem right so i yeah like i think it's not so in the end like i think it's not just about finding simple solutions like it's more like something finding the simplest ones that actually solve the problem

solve the problem and sometimes these solutions can still be somewhat complex because of how the problem that it's supposed to solve is like inherently inherently complex. Like this, there was this essay called No Silver Bullet. Like maybe you've heard it. Like it distinguishes between the types of complexities that you could have, like accidental complexity and essential complexity. And like the kind of complexity that we are trying to avoid, that we should be trying to avoid, should be the complexities that are actually not inherent to the problem. Like, there will always be complexity involved to a solution of a problem.

But I think the real matter is understanding the nature of the problem because like the essential like if you underestimate the essential complexity I think it's just as bad as overestimating the complexity like in terms of hierarchy i think we can think something like like if the solution that gets the thing done in a little complexity as possible way like this is the best thing you can aim for i guess but but still like this is i think this is also important like if a bloated solution important like if a bloated solution actually solves a problem like this is i think better than having a minimal solution that doesn't solve the problem like if you are editing images images for example or do it in image magic you could do some you could use some unique utilities and so on but like try it try to do actual good work in it like of course you would need something like jim or like krista or stuff like that. So I guess this is something that most of the people who seek minimalism can also miss.

Like we shouldn't always try to seek minimalism if they don't just work out. Like we should understand how complex a solution should be and then try to minimize the complexity of the solutions we are trying to do. But yeah. This is definitely something that I've ran across a lot in the early days I was using Linux, where, as I said, I started on i3 and then I moved up from there. And especially on BSPWM, a lot of the solutions that I came up with to problems,

they kind of sort of worked. But as soon as I went to Orson WM, even though it was the same general idea, it was implemented in a far more functional way. And there were limitations that were built into BSPWM where it was very, very difficult to work around. And maybe there were ways to do it. and maybe there were ways to do it, but what ultimately happened is basically forcing it to operate in a way that it shouldn't, as opposed to using a tool where it pretty much just did the job anyway. And the difference between BSPWM and Awesome, yes, Awesome has a giant config, and yes, Awesome does a lot of stuff, but unless you're using a system from like 1995, the difference in those two window managers is fairly, fairly minimal in the kind of resources your system are using. And I guess the same thing kind of happened

when I started using Sway on Wayland and Hyperland as well, where there were things where... There were things which other desktops already had solutions for, where I kind of tried to hack something together that kind of 95% of the time worked but sometimes it just did something random which I could not really explain. Yeah I mean yeah that's like a problem. Like, we tend to prefer minimal software, but if it just doesn't work, there is no point sticking to it, I guess.

no point sticking to it I guess. One of the things we brought up like a while ago was with the blog post misunderstandings people had and I was thinking of one of them just before I saw a lot of people misunderstanding what you were trying to do there sort of interpreting it as you saying this is what you should be doing with Linux. People were saying, yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't have time to do this. This like, why, why would I go and do this? Whereas that wasn't the, the intention that you had with it. Yeah.

Like my intention was something like, okay, like there are these ideological reasons. There are these ideological reasons there are these um practical reasons but like there is also this one the ascesis one like it improves you as a software developer and like we can argue about whether it truly improves or not but but still i am not trying to say that you should be trying to be the best developer out there. I am not saying something like you will be the best developer if you use Linux or stuff like that. I am just saying something relatively simple. Using Linux, like minimal Linux distribution, will make you appreciate the subcomponents of the system that you are using will make your

understanding a bit better like make you think in a more programatical way not only about the work you do like your development work but also about your own environment which you are operating on stuff like that but as you said some people just understand understood it like i was trying to convince people yeah to be an aesthetic or some sort of if you want to give that that theological view you could say trying to proselytize your your idea to them like this yeah you could say trying to proselytize your your idea to them like this yeah you're trying to you're trying to convert them to your your linux religion yeah i mean i'm okay like whatever they use like i have a friend who is using gnome like as his uh main desktop environment. And he's actually very productive, like, and he also understand the things I'm doing, like he isn't like, he doesn't

know what goes under the hood and stuff like that. But, like, for him, it's just a preference, like he knows what's under the hood as well. And I think there's a value in this approach. And it's often overlooked aspect of using Linux, the learning aspect. Yeah, this is one of the things that I... As Linux gets more popular,

I feel like having these easier ways to approach linux obviously are good for that but when those when those nice graphical utilities do something wrong exactly very confusing to someone what happened a good example that I saw recently, I was watching a video by Samtime and he was trying out Ubuntu and I guess he must have closed a terminal during an update process and Apt didn't let go of the database lock so he tried to use the GUI app center to install an application,

and it gave a giant warning saying, depackage.lock could not be retrieved, or whatever the warning message was. Basically, it was saying that there was a database lock and you couldn't do anything. But all he did was click install the application, and the application didn't install the the warning that was provided was very useful to someone who is experienced with linux who if they saw that on the terminal you know that would give them an idea of what to do but if you're yeah if you're coming

from a windows or a mac os background and you click install application, and it just throws this very technical warning at you, it can be really confusing what you're supposed to do with that. Exactly. Like, I think the problem here is that you are making an abstraction to make things easier, but you actually can't, you are actually not able to hide all underlying aspects of the thing that you are abstracting away.

So it leaks like on one hand you have this window application that you click stuff, install packages and so, but then you click, when you close that window, it still works under the hood and it locks your package management files so that you cannot install another thing through your terminal and so on. But the window itself, like since it is designed to make it feel easy, doesn't give you this understanding. And as you said, when things go wrong, you just fail. I think it's just as important that how a program acts, how much it is easy to fix it when things go wrong.

Because when things go right, like no problem, OK. But in that, things will go wrong someday or at some place. So I think it's better to be equipped with that low level understanding to some extent so that when things go wrong, like even if you use higher level tools, like some abstraction or so, you still have some kind of an idea on what to fix for. But I think NixOS is a very bad operating system if you are not experienced with Linux.

Because what you are doing is again as you said linux is a very bad operating system you took kind of a pause there just had to laugh no no like i haven't still decided where nixos are good or not obviously i really like the package manager itself like nix and i also like the approach that nixos is trying to achieve but i'm still like trying to decide whether it's it really makes sense to use it or not but like i'm using it and it's fine so far it was fine for me so far but like the problem is that you are putting a layer again the same abstraction problem between your system like right now, you are telling NixOS to how to manage those configurations and it does it for you. But in the end, what determines how your programs will work is the end result, like the final configurations that you have.

And if you don't know how those things work in a way and want to change stuff, like you won't be able to look what to look for in NixOS either. So if you are using an abstraction, I think it's best to know what goes under the hood as well. It's weird that people think like, oh, abstractions are about, oh, we use abstractions so that we don't have to know about the underlying structure and stuff like that. I think this is silly. You are assuming that you can achieve more stuff by knowing less stuff. But I don't think this is the point of abstractions. Like I guess the point of abstraction is something like, okay, I know how to do this stuff.

Like I have a brief understanding, but I just don't want to bother with this stuff. Like- Achieving more functionality with less effort. Exactly. Like for me, the main benefit of abstractions is like that. Because as you know, if you start to use too much abstractions, like even in your code

and stuff like that, it can also make it harder to write understandable code and stuff like that So yeah You start to if you start making just just a basic example if you start writing everything you do as generic interface code you start to have this code where your type system just does not mean anything and if you know how the code base works you can navigate around it but you're you're taking away a lot of those um a lot of those those nice safeguards you have um one thing i want to ask you about is what is it about the nixos package manager you like? Because I've heard some people talk about Nix,

but I never really picked their brains about why they use it. Like for me, the main reason why I switched to NixOS was to, like before using NixOS, in my Archinux setup, like I would have this dot files GitHub repository that I like commit the configuration files that I have in my system to my repository

so that if I later use some other computer and if I need to set up my environment again I don't bother much like I could just clone the repository there and use those files and Etc but one problem was that when you are using the like when you are configuring your system in a standard Linux environment with like file hierarchy standards, your system is kind of cluttered. So it's very easy to like forget to commit the changes that you do. Like because since it's cluttered all around, like it's very easy to forget the changes that you do. Because since it's cluttered all around, it's very easy to forget a change that you have done in a file. There is also the problem of that installation part is kind of imperative. So you also need document like how to install these kind of

stuff like for example you install dwm and then you compile it and then you add then you compile another program called dwm blocks and then if you have any patches, apply to it and stuff like that. This is an imperative process and you somehow need to make a... Either you need to make a documentation for it or you need to create a make file stuff like that for it. But either way, the reproducibility part is somehow like lacking it's not as solid so this was somehow the thing that motivated me to switch to NixOS but I later then found that I didn't need to switch to NixOS for that like I could have just used Nix and the tool written around Nix called Home Manager.

This would suffice as well. So I kind of overkilled it. But since I'm already used to NixOS and using it, since I already paid the initial cost of using it, for me, I don't have a need to go back into standard systems as well. Obviously, you will have some problems with NixOS, especially if you try to pre-compiled library or stuff like that like dynamic linking is an issue like you will have to learn about this stuff but there are also workarounds and you will also learn about those stuff as well and even like if i decide that nixos doesn't work for me in the future. Like I would still be left with the knowledge I learned through this process. Like I seen that how hard of a job is to. Managed packages like in a reproducible manner

that doesn't cause dependency conflicts, stuff like that and so on. Like you appreciate how hard these problems are and even that by itself is a meaningful experience to me okay fair enough fair enough yeah so going back to what you're saying before about having these these I guess complex applications that you don't really understand what's going on behind the scenes are you aware of oh my zsh oh my zsh I have heard of it but I never tried it or okay I I don't even use the ZSH like I've been trying fish lately Like it's as an experiment, but I've been using bash for most of my like carrier

So what OhMyZSH is is basically it's basically, it's... How do I explain? It's a giant plugin collection that runs on top of ZSH. So it's basically like hundreds of shell aliases and shell plugins and it's just this giant thing that people throw on top of zsh and the reason i wanted to bring this up is a lot of people talk about this as being you know the thing that is required to make zsh usable but what ends up happening is you have all of this additional functionality that you don't even know exists

you have hundreds of shell aliases that you didn't make that yes maybe it makes some of the core stuff easier to do but if you ever want to be in a situation where you're not using OMAR ZSH understanding what actually came from that and came from ZSH itself is especially if you didn't ever start with a plain config can be very very confusing and

because all ZSH doesn't really have plugins all of the plugins are just shell scripts they're just shell scripts configuring ZSH doesn't really have plugins. All of the plugins are just shell scripts. They're just shell scripts configuring ZSH in a certain way. So you can take all of those and run them independent of it. But unless you understand how this thing all fits together, knowing where to even begin looking for that stuff can be a giant, giant endeavor.

Yeah, like what you say also is aligned with what we have talked so far. Like I haven't tried this tool or don't know how bloated it is, like is it bloated or not? But like when you edit a wrapper around a thing and you don't understand the thing that is wrapped like obviously if things go wrong you will have hard time but if you had instead very simple tools around this thing itself like it would have been much easier for you to fix things when things go wrong. And you can also always use these big tools if you are already equipped with the knowledge that is about the thing that you are wrapping around. So probably, I don't know OmaiZsh, but probably the problem isn't just OmaiZsh itself.

But- That's a hard one to say. A lot of people say Zshell, if that's easy, just call it Zshell. Zshell is a lot easier, yeah. I mean, what I was saying I forgot. You were basically saying that if you understand the simple parts of it you can always grab the complex thing and I guess take the parts you need I think is what you're trying to get yeah yeah yeah like I think that's the benefit of approaching things from bottom to up instead of top to bottom

yeah there are there are some of these for um vim as well where they're these big pre-configured versions of vim like yeah kickstart yeah yeah yeah nv chat stuff like that i've tried some of them and i'm sure they're great for people who if you approach it like um like a code editor like if if you approach it like you're using you know eclipse or intellij or vs code where you you don't treat it like vim you treat it like its own separate application and you learn it as that application. I'm sure you can understand it really well, but I don't know.

I just find it... I find it enjoyable to take something simple and then try to add in the things that I want to add into it. Even if it takes me longer. Same here. Even if it's not perfect at the end, I still enjoy doing that. Yeah, like me too. So I guess one other thing you want to talk about in here is

creating your own blog platform instead of using the existing things that exist. Yeah. Like, I mean, I think we can ask like why create your own blog instead of using like other platforms? Like you could have write write you could have written in twitter like medium stuff like that like the reasons like why i started my own blog instead of using these external platforms like medium sub stack is somehow like similar to some of the reasons, like why some of the

reasons we talked about, like why I initially started using Linux, like it gives you like more control, like you get to decide what to do with your essays, like you, and also like you get this experience like the cozy feeling from having your own site with your own custom decisions like a friend of mine like jen told me that this concept of digital digital gardening. And like, I really like the concept itself. So your blog site is kind of like your own garden and like just as how you move the lawn, plant trees, flowers, like make some decorations with your garden, maybe like you kind of get to do the same thing with your own site as well. Like in the end, it becomes your own thing that you have control over on how to represent yourself to the world. And I think it's like the feeling itself is great.

And like I think like another very important reason is that when you use these external platforms, like, for example, Medium, you write stuff, you post there, and then a person tries to reach your essay, and then they see this weird paywall on their essay and i think this is really weird because you are writing your essay and it kind of doesn't belong to you like they decide what to do with your content to some extent and they make it harder for other people to see it like and they can even get paid for your work this way like they can add stuff like that and I find this a bit weird like really weird stuff because most of the content writers writers do it for the purpose of... I am looking for the words.

Pardon me. Not so good. Spread, spread. Yeah. Most of the content writers are doing so in order to spread their ideas. They are trying to achieve, reach more people. And then the platform that you are using could easily prevent you from reaching more people by just adding a login screen, paywall screen.

No, I just want to be accessible to other people. This is why I think and suggest to people who are considering to blog to actually create their own blog. They can even use stuff like WordPress, like it's open source and stuff like that. And it's kind of a bloated solution, which I don't prefer myself. But it's still better than, I guess, using these kind of platforms. What do you actually use to manage your blog? What have you got written in?

Like, I'm using this static site generator called Hugo. Like, I could have written it by myself as well like that's what my my one of my friends do himself it's not that much hard of a thing to create static site generators but with hugo like you get most of these features that you would have been implementing out of the box, which I find it's really helpful. You can create your own deep teams with what kind of HTML structures that you would want to have in your page and stuff like that. And it's kind of minimal, not very minimal, but still kind of minimal. It's kind of fast as well.

Well, in the end, you're just generating a, the thing you're hosting on your site is still just a generated static site. You haven't got a React page that you've got full of JavaScript. Exactly. you haven't got a react page that you've got full of javascript exactly yeah it requires javascript to be enabled for the site to even function yeah so hugo's a really really cool tool i've i've messed around with it a bit myself i i was in the process of rewriting my website and then i got lazy and i stopped it but i i was halfway done rewriting my site and I'll just I'll just use Hugo. Eventually I will finish doing that I'll use Hugo and because I basically before I was doing that like the current site I have effectively has a static site generated.

It's just a kind of thrown together script that I wrote myself. But if I'm going to do that, like, the script didn't work very well anyway. It was kind of, it required some weird additions to make things function. There are probably things that are lighter to use than Hugo but like it for what I want I think Hugo does everything

everything I possibly want I guess there's a lot of stuff in there that I just don't particularly care about but at the end in the end it's still just generating a static site. Yeah, like, I mean, it's good to reinventing the hill for the purpose of ASCII, but like, when doing actual things like that, you are expecting to be stable and

frictionless and so on it's also fine to use the tools that are already been implemented and it's not it's not like it's something very complex or stuff like that so what else can we go to you what have we not covered i think we've covered a lot of stuff actually yeah yeah actually one of the earlier posts that i did see you write i don't know when it came out um oh it was earlier this year uh you wrote a post about de-bloating android this is something i've never bothered like my like my phone this i i don't do anything special with my phone my de-bloating my phone is just not using it just putting it as far away from me as possible and only using it for the absolute minimal things i need so like by debilitating your phone actually what i mean is something like getting rid of the pre-built installed programs that are on your phone because like you i wasn't like i didn't

bother to do that as well although it was always in my mind like I was lazy to do it but one day like my mother came to me and shown his phone like there was this pop-ups coming out randomly asking some questions like would you get this service like would you get this service and so on and like if you click it accidentally to the yes button like you actually need to pay them like this is one of the worst things like it's cancer literally and i got really frustrated i was like what the yeah i was angry and like i just looked up ways how can i uh got rid of that program and so on and i found some ways to do it but then but then I took it even further. Like why don't I do this for other programs that come pre-built as well?

So what I've just done is a very simple approach. Like I have listed the bloated package names on text files plain text files and what i would do is to use this tool called adb so it basically connects it basically creates a shell session on your computer that is connected on your phone yeah the main function of adb is it yeah android debugging for yeah yeah stuff yeah and you can also manage packages and stuff like that so what i have done is just listing the programs that i consider to be bloatware and then chatting them and piping it to chatting them and piping it to like the command that is required to delete those packages with xrx and I would just enter them whenever I get a new phone and I would immediately get rid of all those bloodware like I automated the process like it's not a very simple uh like it's not a very clever kind of a solution but it works and it is somehow minimal so

i use this even like these days if i get any what is installed on an android phone that you don't really want i i know obviously there's a lot of there's going to be pre-installed apps where you maybe just never use it or yeah maybe you you wanna use an alternative version of that. But what else would there be that you just wanna get rid of? I mean, I guess it depends on the brand as well. Like if you like some Chinese companies or stuff like the phones that come with.

This one, yeah. Yeah, the phones that come from those kind of countries came with lot of like pre-built software that is unremovable like i was using xiaomi before my current phone and like gallery application had ads on it on and like gallery application had ads on it. Yeah, that's bad. That's really bad. Yeah.

So I just got rid of those stuff and installed other stuff. I also like, there are also some Google programs that I don't need and come by installed by default. Like you also delete those and stuff like that. So yeah. Have you ever considered trying out one of the custom Android ROMs? I considered it, but not deeply. Like, I didn't give a serious time in it. One of my friends actually uses something like Graphene OS or stuff like that.

And I think it's all great. But I also think that it would be just better for me to reduce the usage of this anyways. Like the ideological friend of mine, like the one who was using cubase and so he doesn't even like use a normal cell phone like the ones that are old without even touch screens and etc he is using this and he says to me that he has a lot of mental clearance and i see why he says it like when traveling, for example, in the bus or stuff like that, you see these people looking around their phone, like watching weird brain-rotting videos.

And so it's probably very tempting to do so. I can understand it on the bus. But what I find really weird is when you go to a restaurant and you see a group of people all sitting on their phone that's what's really weird to me like exactly you're sitting next to your friend who maybe you haven't seen in a little bit have you considered actually talking to them yeah like you actually spent time to get there and now you are doing a thing that you could have done at any place like yeah i see a lot of that at the gym as well i those are always really really weird ones where you'll see someone do like one set and then they'll just scroll on tiktok for five minutes like what are you doing

here i i i get it if you're one thing that a lot of people will do is they will watch a video when they're on the treadmill or on the bike but they're actually doing the exercise it's just trying to distract themselves from the exercise while they're doing it but when you see people take these these giant breaks just to scroll through their phone for a bit i use my phone when i when i when i go to the gym i will have my phone to listen to music or listen to a podcast but that's the only thing that i do with it i i'm not gonna look. If someone sends me a message when I'm at the gym, I'll deal with that later. Like, I also used to use the phone in gym for taking, like, notes, how I performed on each set,

like, logging this stuff. But I then later realized that once you open the phone and, like, start logging stuff, like, you can also get... once you open the phone and start logging stuff, like you can also get distracted. Right, right. Meanwhile, and I also realized that logging each day actually doesn't matter much. Like as long as you progressively overload,

like as long as you keep your push yourself i can remember a couple of numbers in my head i don't need to write them down every time yeah yeah there are some people who really like to see um like their progression on a graph and i understand that but i as i i i know what my performance is. I can see it. I'm not as interested in seeing, hey, look, at this specific month, I was at this weight, and now at this month, I can do this weight.

Oh, I took some time off, and now I'm back down a bit. I get it, and there's people who really like that data. It's the same idea with people who wear these like sleep tracker bands where it'll tell you how much sleep you got what percentage you were got was it was in rem sleep and i i get like if you really like the numbers it's cool but yeah like i also have this urge to quantify things but like i try to resist the temptation well it's one thing if you're quantifying it and another thing if you're doing anything with the data because if you're just collecting the data for the sake of it

again if that's what you want to do if that's's your hobby, go right ahead. But if I'm going to collect that data, I want it to be so that I can do something with it. I want to, if I was using a sleep tracker, I would want to use that data to change something about my habits so that I could improve what I'm doing. prove what I'm doing. Exactly. Like, it's not like you aren't doing what you are supposed to do when you are going to gym and like progressively overloading, pushing yourself to limits. So if you don't use the data that you have collected later on, like, I mean, what's the point? And what I realized is that I wasn't using that data. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've done stuff with that as well. I have a, a few years back,

one of my parents bought me a smartwatch that I can use for like step tracking and workout tracking. And for a while I did look at the data on there and it's cool. Yeah, but if I'm just doing what I always do, I guess if you use it to remind yourself that you haven't done something, but I guess that is still using it to change your habits then so it's still in a way using that data yeah in the end it goes back to what we were saying with the post though if that's the thing you

want to do like it's your life like do do whatever you want with your time. Exactly. As long as it doesn't harm anyone or, like, isn't, like, something evil or so. Yeah. Like, do whatever you want. It's your life. Yeah. Are there any other things you wanted to talk about? Otherwise, we can sort of start wrapping up the episode. Like, I think everything is covered.

We can talk for hours and hours. It's very fun to talk with you. But I also see that- I had a lot of fun as well. This was a good episode. Yeah. I'm glad that I was a guest on your podcast. I think one advantage of writing is

among other benefits such as solidifying your thoughts, getting feedback from other people, etc. It's also to get to be able to meet people such as Brody. So I think I will even write more in the future about things like I learned, like my views and so on. So thanks a lot, like Rodi.

Yeah, it was very, how do I say? It was a very good experiment for me. Yeah, I think you did a perfectly fine job. I know you were worried about how it was gonna go, but no, besides you forgetting a couple of words which to be fair i do myself a couple of times um i yeah i think i think it was a good episode i i might have to go back and have a look at some of those earlier posts you've written as well i had a a brief scroll through them and there's there is some interesting ones in there as well that i i would like to cover

like the um the plain text one i think yeah that's a good one yeah things to say about that as well um like as you go to the as you go the more previous ones like they start to become worse like i wasn't I wasn't as used to writing as I am right now. Like, yeah, I always write. I have always written things in my life. Like, I have a diary around like 300 pages, if you count like each page to be around 500 words or so. And I also write, take notes and stuff like that.

But I didn't try to publicly write about things before. And I saw that my writing got improved as I have written new things. That's also, I guess, one of the benefits. Well, if anyone wants to check out your blog post where can they find them um they can find them through my website like rugu.dev Is there anything else you would like to direct people to? Or is that the only thing that you want to mention you have? They can go through my blog. They can go to my website and all the hyperlinks related to my other stuff as are also available there like they can also email to me like we can talk about things we can discuss i i really like to know like

other people discussing about things as well like i have made some friends this way and I also really appreciate the aspect of writing, this aspect of writing. But that's cool. Yeah. I would like to write more myself. There have been times I've definitely thought about sitting down and doing blog posts, but every time I do, I think, well, I really do enjoy doing the video stuff as well right i think what you are doing is way harder than writing because like you are actually producing videos editing

them stuff like that and you're also reaching a large audience like it's it's a responsibility like it's really good like you are a hard worker as far as i see i i definitely feel like i could work harder there's always someone who's working harder than you that you can always compare yourself yeah yeah um yeah but i guess we can um we can end it off there um i will do my outro and then we can sign off. So my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Check that out. I don't know what will be there by the time this comes out.

Actually, I reckon by the time this comes out, because I've got a backlog, this might actually come out next year. I don't know. Maybe it'll be the last episode of the year. We'll see. I've got the gaming channel, Brody on Games. I've probably hopefully finished Black Myth Wukong

by now. I really hope I have because I was stuck in that fight for a long time. I'll be done with Kingdom Hearts 3. Probably playing Nine Souls now. If you want to see clips from that stream, that is on Brody Robinson Reacts. Feel free to go check those out as well. And if you're listening to the audio

version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you'd like to hear the audio version, it's on basically every podcast platform. It's on Spotify if you want to see the video release as well there. I'll give you the final word. How do you want to sign off the episode?

I never tell anyone they're doing this like I guess I can say some quote or stuff like that go right ahead let me look at it like okay so i guess this might be a bit of irrelevant but i want

to close it by a random code which is on my site by seneca okay We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. Like I was very, like this is the quote of Seneca, and I was really hesitant to be on this episode. I was nervous and anxious. And overall, like my previous thoughts about how it will go was way worse than how it actually went. So I think it was a good episode.