The people I know in my program (undergrad History) use their computers for little more than Google Chrome (specifically Google’s Office suite), a PDF reader (sometimes also Google Chrome), sometimes Zotero, and sometimes MS Word. We get a lot of Mac’s around here, so one can imagine Microsoft products are not highly relied upon, generally speaking.

Everything’s through the browser nowadays, so I’d say just pick a stable distro, install 2 or three browsers in case something doesn’t work (like Google Docs with Firefox in my experience…), and submit everything as PDF.

Can’t speak much to LibreOffice as I write my papers in Typst (and before that in LaTeX, which got me brownie points with some of the older professors), which I find much faster, easier, and more flexible than WYSIWYG word processors.

Fourthing sway, specifically swayfx and (as someone already mentioned) autotiling, both of which are available in the Nix repository without hassle.

Ed is the standard editor.

qutebrowser and Nyxt are both projects I desperately want to be capable of replacing my web browser.

As far as rounded corners and easy to use, I’ve had a tremendous time with swayfx for the past few months, which I switched to from Hyprland.

I used Doom for a while, but it was still slow. I’ve been replacing emacs with more unix-y tools (helix/neovim as editor, yazi for file manager, etc.). I really just miss the design of emacs (the self-documentation, the infinite extensibility, etc.). I hope someday maybe Lem will fill my needs (which I just learned about yesterday).

A fine day that will be!

That’s my first time hearing of Lem—it looks fantastic. What’s the issue with it on NixOS?

The most satisfying part of the NixOS process is deploying to bare metal and watching it work exactly as you intend it to

Hey!

I’ve wanted something very similar—specifically, a plain-text database. I recently came across GNU recutils, which I haven’t had time to play around with yet, but which seems like it fits the bill (at least for me). There’s a couple YouTube videos on it—I encourage you to check it out!

Niflheim might one day be the name of an actual Nix-based distro…

Thank you! I was just suffering from this an hour ago…

Never heard of Aeon—I wonder if it will become as popular as the Fedora immutable distros?

Love fuzzel! Glad to see some much anticipated features!

+1 for the Terminus + zellij + helix combo

Not to add fuel to the flame by asking, but how’s it been on Guix? I’ve heard Guix does a lot of things better, but also that there’s far less packages and it’s harder on modern hardware.

I tried imv and hated it. I just use feh (through XWayland) or mpv now.

As if I needed more reasons to love Stephen Fry!

What’s that tablet it’s running on?

This is awesome! Thank you!