My Personal Workstation Configuration (as of 2017)

There's a limited set of software that I use on my computer and like data, I'm very particular of what software resides on my hard-drive. Since about in 2013, when I switched from Windows to the wide-open universe of Linux, the way I get software has changed a lot and that in some way has changed the software I use on my computer. I used executable setup files to install software back then and switched to the much cleaner and programmatic apt in my first Ubuntu Linux, later to dnf on Fedora and currently am using home-brew on my Mac.

Being able to install software programmatically also helps me at what I care the most about my system: how quickly and effortlessly can I restore my system or replicate it on another system, just in case of trouble.

You can see how minimal my system setup is at https://github.com/myTerminal/dotfiles/blob/master/.scripts/mac/setup.sh.

The Window Manager

Over last few years, I tried various Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, NetRunner, KUbuntu, XUbuntu, LUbuntu, Korora, Zorin OS, openSUSE, Fedora, etc. and a bunch of desktop environments like Gnome 2.x, Gnome Shell, Unity, KDE, Cinnamon, LXDE, XFCE, Mate, Enlightenment, Pantheon, i3wm and a few other variants that I cannot remember.

I settled for i3wm as a tiling window manager on my Fedora, without a need for a desktop environment and the need of using a mouse except for while using graphical applications. I still remember the moment when I just gave my mouse a break.

Mac OS Sierra offers a decent default desktop environment to work with, where spotlight and spaces smoothly replace my far too geeky d-menu and workspaces in i3wm, but if I were to ever go back, i3wm on Fedora will be my obvious choice.

Google Chome

Google Chrome (and Chromium) has been the only web browser that I have been using since I’ve stepped into the world of open technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and their other web-oriented associates. From a person who just browsed MSDN pages over the web with Internet Explorer, I turned into a web-developer who used Google Chrome extensively and never looked back at the Internet Explorer. I see a shift there, from being a Microsoft indoctrinated fan to an aware individual who could see things beyond Microsoft Windows and its defaults.

Today, I spend most of the time on my computer reading posts on the internet, looking at others’ code on GitHub, watching videos on YouTube, etc.

In Fedora, all you need to get Google Chrome is

dnf install google-chrome

On my Mac I do

brew cask install google-chrome

Emacs

I got introduced to Emacs in 2012 and I started using it in 2013 and it has been my only way to work with text on a computer. Unless needed by a project, I could stay within Emacs for all my tasks even at work, due to which I never got a chance to explore a few other text-editors that I found interesting, for instance: the Atom editor.

Since the last few years, I have been so infatuated with Emacs, I managed to write numerous extensions and created a couple of ‘mini’ starter packs: super-emacs and ample-emacs. I am also proud of my Emacs configuration on GitHub.

On Fedora, I installed Emacs with

dnf install emacs

On my Mac, unfortunately, it is a manual step of downloading a setup file from https://emacsformacosx.com as there are a lot of different flavors available and this is the one that I found closest to what I need. The one available through the command line was a terminal-only version of Emacs at the time of this writing.

Finder

I tried a lot of different graphical file managers on Linux and I settled down on one of the most simplistic ones: pcmanfm. It is a plain simple file manager with all the basic features one would look for in a file manager with a few added ones. On my Mac, it is replaced by Finder, which is the built-in file manager for the Macintosh operating system. It is a default, yes, but it does the job well enough to be not replaced at the moment.

Terminal

This is another default that I am tied to on the Mac. I have installed iterm2, as it is known to be better than the former but have never spent the time to explore it, at least as much as I would before switching to it entirely. Besides, the default terminal works well with the window manager on Mac so I do not feel an immediate need for improvement there. On Fedora, it used to be terminology, a very light-weight and theme-able command line, one of the best and most easily available terminals available on Linux.

Clementine

I came across Clementine on Linux quite a few years ago and with iTunes on Mac already, I still use Clementine for music. Surely it does not look that good on a Mac screen with so many pixels to draw, but it still does the job with all fade-ins and fade-outs working perfectly by default, unlike Linux where I had to install gstreamer backend on some distributions for it to work correctly.

Besides, I do not like the idea of requiring twice as space for my music on my space-precious SSD because iTunes does not like working with my music right away but likes to import them all and waste a lot of precious space which otherwise I would prefer to keep free.

On Fedora, one can install Clementine with

dnf install clementine

On Mac, I installed it as

brew cask install clementine

Steam

Since I do not have a Windows-based PC to play games right now, I prefer to have a package manager for my games too. Steam seems to do the job well, with almost all the games I need already present in the Store. Back there with my Linux system, I used to have a separate hard-drive partition to run Windows with Steam installed, which is something that I do not need anymore. I like to keep Windows out of my Macintosh hard-drive even for gaming.

On Fedora, installing Steam was as simple as

dnf install steam

provided you have added RPM Fusion repositories first.

On Mac, I installed it as

brew cask install steam