Thanks! I was going to remove it and take another picture but then I thought, well why not just show a slice of everyday life? It’s cold and dry where I live in Canada and my skin needs some lotion so I don’t get the alligator complexion.
I was thinking a lot of this excellent Calvin and Hobbes comic when I was taking the picture, should I clean up my desk before I take a picture so I appear to be neat and tidy or just present my life as-is unfiltered?
I often struggle with how messy my desk becomes. My preferred style of note taking to work out a problem is a good pen and pads of paper, so things end up accumulating and I don’t feel like I want people to see my office. Thank you for sharing this picture! I’m right in the middle of reorganizing, or I’d show you how bad mine can get.
It is! It was an accessory that was available with that monitor and from what I recall, a lot of Dell business/professional monitors. Here’s what it looks like off the monitor.
I got tired of managing separate monitors, and went for this 4K, 42” Dell monitor a little over a year ago. I use BSPWM, so it’s like having 4 smaller screens but with almost none of the hassle or cables.
My keyboard is a Cooler Master “Storm QuickFire Stealth”, which despite the ridiculous name, is a pretty nice Cherry MX Brown 60%. I also have an Infinity Ergodox, also with browns (not pictured); but while it is fun for coding and would be really cool for gaming due to its programmability, it has some key sticking issues that prevent me from gaming on it. Before the pandemic, it was my keyboard at the office.
The mouse is a Logitech G600. While I don’t play MMOs, I still love having a ton of programmable buttons for other types of games, and for window manager commands.
Ergonomic seating is important if you program for a living, but new Herman Miller chairs are incredibly expensive. However, it was pretty easy to find this Aeron second-hand for less than half the price of a new one. Usually the only thing wrong with these is a busted lumbar support bar, but that is relatively cheap to replace.
I started using yabai and came to a similar conclusion. Although I started with 2 huge monitors (34” Ultrawide Dells) and instead just stopped using the one. At east for me the problem was I ended up loving the windows auto-handled for me that I didn’t feel like dealing with dragging os x desktops/windows between the monitors. I have been thinking about using 1 at a 90 degree angle again, but ultrawide+90 degrees leaves very little wiggle room above the desk.
Yay System76! I just bought a Thelio and am SUPER delighted with it. Both the hardware itself and the excellent pre and post sales support.
I also love what they’re doing with Pop!_OS - the tiling window manager Gnome extension is a nice touch, although some accessibility bugs may have me falling back to my usual choice of Plasma or Elementary.
I’ve ordered myself a Tuxedo Pulse 15 (Tuxedo also works with a Clevo, or in this case Tongfang shell), can’t wait to get it and see what it looks like.
Fantastic! I think this trend towards Linux supporting hardware vendors is a SUPER exciting development for broadening the accessibility of open source operating systems.
Now if only the non KDE desktops would get on the accessibility bandwagon, we’d be in good shape :)
A lot of the fun stuff isn’t visible – but most everything are day to day or at the least used weekly as part of all things Arcan development. Some of the major pieces (servers, android farm, … excluded):
Weird Input / Output Devices:
Tobii 4C, 5C eye trackers
3DConnexion 3D mouse
Captogloves
PS5 Dual Sense
Leap Motion
StreamDeck
Wacom Intuos tablet
Capture/Measuring/Basic Electronics:
ElGato Game Capture HD
ElGato Camlink 4k
ColorHug
BladeRF
Bus Pirate, Jtagulator, Bluetooth LE Friend, OpenVizla 3.2)
LabNation SmartScope
SIGLENT 1102CML
Displays (need to swap in something with DisplayHDR600 at least):
NOC G2460PF (for FreeSync / 144Hz)
Asus VG27BQ (for GSync / HDR10 / 165Hz)
Laptops:
Thinkpad Yoga X1 (3rd gen)
Asus ZenBook 15 (For ScreenPad and nvidia/intel hybrid graphics)
Macbook Pro 2015 (“Last time I’ll buy / use Apple laptops”, OSX testing)
Toshiba c380 Chromebook (lower-end target)
Surface Go
E-ink/Mobile/Specialized etc:
GPD Pocket 2
reMarkable2
Kobo Forma
HMDs:
Rift betas + CV1
PSVR
Vive, Vive-Pro
Reverb G1, G2
assortment of SBCs (jetson, most of the fruit-named, computesticks), a few clusterboards fuzzing arm-stuff.
I’m currently away from home, so my picture is a little old, but nothing has changed. I use i3+polybar and a Dell XPS.
By the way, the XPS is a terrible computer and only god can help you if anything goes wrong with it. I had 6 consecutive trips to their repair location, with one repair breaking another component. I gave up after the 6th, because they replaced the laptop, and the microphone and trackpad broke within months.
I just use push to talk. The keyboard is loud enough to be audible wherever I put the mic. It’s a Cooler Master Masterkeys Pro S, as dumb as that name sounds :P
I use i3wm as my window manager. The editor used is Emacs, obviously. I’m working on a Gemini client, which is what you see in the first workspace. In the second workspace, I have my IRC client, lurch open, which I’ve been working on since about November of last year.
I love that you are using WindowMaker! For me it mostly brings nostalgia, but I’m curious to know how it works for you! Like, why not OpenBox or Awesome? (example of floating/tilling wms)
And what about FreeBSD? I’ve used it for a while but not sure how it would work as a daily driver. How has your experience been?
And what about FreeBSD? I’ve used it for a while but not sure how it would work as a daily driver. How has your experience been?
I suspect that will vary quite a lot depending on what you actually need to do. I spend a lot of time these days in MS Office, and run Windows on my work laptop and desktop, but my work desktop has 48GB of RAM dedicated to a FreeBSD VM and pretty much all development that I do happens in that VM, occasionally checking things out in the host environment (with or without WSL) if the Windows or Linux CI jobs fail.
FreeBSD is gradually falling behind on a few things though. No official .NET Core port means no GitHub Actions, so CI is annoying. No supported Chrome means no supported Electron, so things like VS Code are all best-effort ports of the open source bit and a lot of things don’t work (e.g. no remote extension). No containerd port and so none of the Docker or similar ecosystems reach into FreeBSD-land. The last is the biggest problem because things are increasingly built on top of this. FreeBSD jails would be a much cleaner containerd back end than the horrible mess of namespaces, cgroups, and seccomp-bpf that Linux uses, but someone needs to do the work.
Jails was probably my absolutely favorite feature of FreeBSD. It was so much cleaner and intuitive than linux containers. Ports was also a favorite. Ever since I tried Gentoo, the ability to build my packages from source with whatever flags was something I enjoyed, except when I had to wait a couple of hours to compile X or Gnome…
I hated ports until Poudriere came along. It’s a shame; Poudriere does everything something like docker-build does, in a very clean way, but was never generalised to anything other than building the ports tree. It’s quite easy to set up Poudriere with a custom LOCALBASE to build a small set of ports and their dependencies with custom options. I’d love to see that better supported by the ecosystem.
Basically my work machine is a lenovo carbon X1. That’s been my brand since 2013. Got a couple Lenovo monitors running @ 2560x1440. All accessories coming in through one usbc plug into the laptop that provides power, 2 monitor feeds, and a usb hub. External Keyboard matches laptop keyboard. Above all: no wireless bullshit. I got way too tired of flakiness and batteries. I run a debian variant with cinnamon, so pretty vanilla. Other than that I live in the webbrowser and emacs.
Desktop is occasionally used for bigger tasks or OSS development. I built it all myself, which was a fun learning experience. I basically just access it over ssh with x forwarding (It’s wired to the same switch as the laptop so X forwarding works reasonably well). It’s fairly overpowered.
I bought a Pinebook Pro a few months back and don’t regret it as it’s a noble experiment, but I suspect that in a year or two when the pandemic is over and I go back to actually needing to commute and travel, it’s just not gonna cut it, and a Lennovo is looking pretty compelling. It’ll be interesting to see if they release a laptop with some of the amazing low power / high perf AMD chipset stuff with integrated graphics that’s coming down the pipe.
A HP Envy laptop from 2016 (no the most powerful, hackable or ergonomic, but doesn’t give me any hardware pains). Ample RAM (8GB) and SSD (512GB). Sometimes hooked up to a mediocre 1920x1080 monitor and decent gaming keyboard and mouse I bought for my Raspberry Pi when I didn’t know better.
Running on it, Void Linux (glibc sadly) with dwm (I’ve essentialy scuffed my fork though), st and qutebrowser (best compromise: pretty flexible config and QtWebEngine is nice and modern). System’s using ~600MB right now with 4 tabs, 2 Neovims and a terminal open.
For chatting, weechat for Discord, IRC and Matrix. I like having everything in the same place, and Weechat resource usage is nothing compared to the leaky horrrors of all the Electron clients.
For editing, Neovim (I am losing my mind about Vimscript). I try keep it nice and simple. Used to use Gruvbox light (with hard contrast) but since today I’m using paige plus modifications (I like it).
aerc for email (much simpler than Neomutt, haven’t explored it enough though). For RSS, I use this script. FZF makes a pretty decent UI.
I’m trying out Nix[OS], Acme (love it but a bit of highlighting is nice) and Kakoune.
The most useful small tools I use are abduco for {at,de}taching to terminals and fzf for building UIs (sounds silly but you can get quite far plus fuzzy finding rocks)
I used to maintain a dotfiles repo but I have better things to do than keep my personal stuff tidy for people on the internet. Still version it with Git though, autocommiting on each change (for safety). I feel nice though so:
I run an X1 Carbon running 20.04 with work. My personal rig (read: gaming) is a 3700X + 6800XT in a FormD T1.
My area of most delight is peripherals.
For work:
Atreus 42 + GMK Paperwork
Elecom Deft Pro Trackball
For home use:
InputClub Nightfox
Kensington Pro Fit Ergo
Razer Pro Click Ergonomic
Steam Controller
I currently have a pre-order in for the new version of the UHKB and will try it for home use first.
The area I’m least happy with is the monitor. I like running a single monitor setup but prefer the freedom of more screen real-estate. I’ve been fence-sitting on an Apple Pro Display XDR purchase, but instead think it’ll be more likely I end up getting 2xLG GN950 on a Herman Miller dual monitor arm.
When I’m not standing I use the Mirra 2 from DWR and an ergorest.
I absolutely love it. It’s a digital notebook with some ereader capability. I’ve wanted something like this for years. It’s replaced the legal pads and notebooks I have laying around. The build quality of the hardware is fairly high and pen feel is amazing.
It’s very hackable as well. It runs Linux. The root password is in the help screen. Adding ddvk’s remarkable-hacks adds significant functionality that takes okay software to fairly decent software. Cloud syncing is similar to iCloud. It usually works fast but not instantly; sometimes it takes a bit.
The price is a bit high and the company is having growth issues in relation for support. For official accessories, get the Marker Plus. Having an eraser on the other end is worth the extra $50. If you’re looking to save money, skip the official cases. If you’re going to buy an official case, spend the $150 for the leather folio. It’s expensive and it definitely does not feel worth $150 but it makes the tablet feel like a moleskine notebook.
It’s not one thing that makes the reMarkable 2 amazing for me. It’s all the little things, including how limited it is. If you want a digital notebook you don’t mind doing a little hacking on, it’s truly amazing. If you want it to be anything else, you will be sorely disappointed, especially for the price.
The one big bug that is extremely painful: PDF annotations do not export properly unless the original pdf was in A4 page size. They only look correct on the tablet and in their apps. You have to make make a script to extract the PDFs and feed them though one of the libraries people have made.
I can’t speak for OP, but I absolutely love mine. I’ve tried various notebook replacement tablets in the past. I’ve always fallen back to paper. This is the first tablet that I’ve been able to fully replace all of my paper notebooks with.
Moved into a new house in September and finally got me a proper desk. This photo was taken to highlight the radio gear but it has the computer in there too :)
PC is nothing super special, I’ve got an aging (but still not bad) i7-4790K, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD for the OS, and a bunch of 3TB hard drives in RAIDZ5 for data. SSD prices have come down, but still not enough for me to stomach buying 12TB of them at once, so I’m still waiting.
GPU is an RTX 2070 which just showed up a few days ago. I had a 1070 which I bought back in 2016, and which broke in 2020. When I went to buy a replacement I got the bad news that even just to get another 1070 would cost more than it did four years earlier, so I put in a 1660 scrounged from another machine. This week I had a check come in so I gave in and bought a refurb 2070 for an acceptable price. Luckily the thing works.
Monitor is a Dell S2176DG (27”, 16:9), which I’m happy enough with. It’s a good size for this desk, and runs 2k @ 144fps with this desk. At my office desk (which I haven’t seen in the past 10 months) I have dual 4k monitors but I haven’t missed them very much. I use virtual desktops with convenient hotkeys so I can context switch very quickly, and it isn’t that often that I really care about seeing two things at once.
Keyboard / “mouse” is an IBM/Lexmark TrackPoint IV keyboard from the mid-90s, through a USB to PS/2 adapter. I have another one at work, I have a few of them laid in storage against breakage, and I will be very sad when I can’t find anymore. Nobody in this century makes a replacement that I find suitable.
Software choices:
Kind of hacked up Kubuntu
Kwin used in an almost tiling-like manner with most apps running maximized, and virtual desktops for task switching. The lower desktop numbers are dedicated to things I always have going (email, terminal, web browser), and the higher ones are free space for whatever.
Editor: vim 8 / neovim (I was an early neovim convert but with the recent vim releases I barely even notice which one I’m running. I consider this a perfectly fine outcome.) airline, ctrlp, nerdtree, vcscommand, gitgutter, ale, vista, vim-go, vim-perl, and some other stuff. Colors: a custom 256-color dark scheme (screenshot), originally based on metacosm
Ham stuff in the photo (definitely also counts as part of the battlestation!):
Main rig: Flex 6400M
Amp: SPE Expert 1.3K-FA
Tuner: Palstar HF-AUTO
Transverters: Downeast Microwave L144-28HP and L432-28HP. The L432 is modified to open it up to 430-450 MHz instead of the usual 430-434, so I can use the Flex as my general purpose V/U rig to get on repeaters and stuff, as well as for sats and weak signal.
Actually I mostly enjoy HF. I get on VHF/UHF for the VHF contests, or to chase satellites, or just to talk to locals on the repeaters. But HF is more interesting to me. I have a 500’ skywire loop, a modified Hustler vertical (with a wire up into a tree to make it work on 160m), and a 120’ loop-on-ground as a receive antenna (no room for Beverages). I just didn’t mention all that stuff because it’s not in the photo and this isn’t ham chat :)
Ooh. Those are nice antennas. I’ve got a G5RV Junior and an 80 meter full wave dipole I made that I’m planning on fixing tomorrow. Nothing fancy, just lots of wire in the air. A slight trim of one side while installing it seems to have screwed up the resonance and no one can hear me on FT8, which I’ve been using to test my propagation recently. Or something broke while lifting it up, that’s all part of the fun…
Have you done any exploring of the Flex from Linux? I’ve been starting to come up to speed with the current libraries and some of the proof of concept stuff that’s available around. Here’s one of the fun ones that I’ve seen stuff based on. I’ve just gotten access to a 6400 (not M) and have a local group that has some time reserved over the next four months to do some work on improving access from Linux.
I use a Caldigit TS3+ thunderbolt dock so I only need 1 cable to move between gaming machine, laptop and work laptop. I Recently added an adjustable arm for the monitor to get a bit more desk space back. Keyboard is a Razor Ornata Chroma, which is a hybrid mechanical and membrane - it feels really nice to type on.
Most machines are xubuntu based, but switched to i3wm when I started using ultrawide screens, and now it feels really alien on machines without i3.
PC is a Shuttle DS67U, I think it has an i3 processor. I’ve always hated ‘fan’ noises (vacuum cleaners, electric motors of any kind) so going fanless (around 2017) is one of the upgrades I’ve been most satisfied with in a long time.
The desk itself is a ten year-old IKEA table. I’ve always used it as a desk, but now that I’m working from home full-time, I might cut off part of the apron, to allow myself to sit a bit higher.
Knowing how many of my coworkers have to work in the kitchen, on the couch, or share their workspace with others in their household, I’m incredibly happy to have a dedicated space of my own.
Whole desk, just the desk. I know, it looks horrible. But it’s comfortable enough. I do most of my work on an Intel NUC and a HHKB. I’m looking for a new chair though, can someone recommend anything?
I realized that having one computer wasn’t enough so one if for work (i.e. reliable) and the other is where I can experiment and be free to break (or take two weeks installing Gentoo!)
Here’s this years’ edition, nothing censored. Largely the same as the last year edition.
The big one is an early 34” ultrawide curved LG (3440x1440) and next to it I added (again) my old Dell U2412M with 16:10 ratio. Next to it all is my work workhorse, a fairly decent Dell work workhorse running corporate windows. I don’t very much like the laptop. What I’m especially happy about is coming soon, a Tuxedo Pulse 15 laptop I’ve ordered. It may even serve as a desktop replacement (to retire my old workstation with i7-4790k), but we’ll have to see how much I like it first.
I hope no-one minds, but I posted mine here since Lobsters doesn’t seem to support uploading and rendering media inline. I also started a thread there inspired by this one 🤗
I’m now wondering what, if anything, to change or improve. Oh, I might get an AMD workstation to speed up compiles. One significant improvement since June is using my Sony Rx100 mk3 camera as a webcam.
Personal desktop on the left: Ryzen Hackintosh. Contains stuff. I’m not ‘into’ hardware and just want it to work, not cost too much money, and be quiet.
Big LG screen is lovely and close enough to ‘retina’ that it works for me.
Laptop on the right is MacBook Pro 15” 2015. I have one from work and I also own the same model, so I have a nice consistent setup.
Big Dell screen is lovely but not at all retina. The huge horizontal space is great for getting stuff done.
The split keyboard with orange letters and yellow cables is a Redox from Falba Tech with one of their lovely stained bamboo cases.
Random other stuff that’s in shot:
Apple Watch charging stand in the style of an 80s Mac. I’m a pragmatist and not at all a Mac fetishist but these are great stands and very cheap.
Bright light panel bodged onto a floor lamp’s stand. Really makes it feel more like I’ve had more outdoor time than I actually get during the short winter days.
Good hi-fi amp.
Not in shot:
The floor. This is an IKEA standing desk and I almost always keep it at standing height. It took months to get used to standing all day but I’m glad I did.
The sky. When standing at the desk I see mostly sky out of the window. This makes me feel good.
Good hi-fi floor standing speakers. I love listening to music when I’m doing work that doesn’t require too much concentration.
Software. I use lots of it. Nothing particularly unusual. If it works with Vi keys, that’s an advantage, but I try not to get too attached to any particular software.
Would you recommend using a Sony alpha like that for webcam usage? I’ve been curious about using something more adjustable for improving my exposure and lighting.
If you’re not going to do streaming or content creation there are cheaper alternatives, I just happened to have this one since I use it for photography. It’s a clear step up compared to a regular webcam.
When I did my research I found out there are some Canon alternatives which don’t require a capture card in order to work as webcam.
The Windows install is almost unused except to run Capture One and edit photos. I used a MBP for editing until recently, but this machine is just too fast not to use it, so I needed Windows.
The Debian and FreeBSD configurations are almost identical. I’m running StumpWM, Emacs, and SBCL Common Lisp built from their upstream Git repos. Then I run Chromium, rxvt-unicode and tmux from the OS repo, and the Spotify app.
Calling someone’s workstation a battlestation is not nice. I hope people are not doing their jobs while thinking they have to fight everyday. And if your workstation is an actual battlestation, please find a different career, one without sowing destruction.
Obligatory please don’t tell anyone how I live, here is my very messy desk:
OS: Arch Linux
CPU: Intel i5-6600 @ 3.30 GHz
RAM: 16 GB DDR4
WM: i3
MB: Gigabyte Q170M-D3H
KB: IBM Model M
GPU: Nah
Cat: Orange and White Maine Coon, “Salsa” aka “Salsa T. Cat Esq.”
Cat treats: Chicken
Water: Tap
Coffee: Black
Whisky: Neat
I enjoyed this image very, very much. Thank you for your honesty! I particularly enjoyed the pump bottle of vaseline.
Thanks! I was going to remove it and take another picture but then I thought, well why not just show a slice of everyday life? It’s cold and dry where I live in Canada and my skin needs some lotion so I don’t get the alligator complexion.
I was thinking a lot of this excellent Calvin and Hobbes comic when I was taking the picture, should I clean up my desk before I take a picture so I appear to be neat and tidy or just present my life as-is unfiltered?
This feels like home. I don’t know if you can actually compare two messes but our areas feel equal in messiness.
I see the base for the soldering iron. I’m scared to ask where in here the actual iron is.
Haha, it’s off to the left, on the window sill.
Fantastic! As well as Arch, I’m a huge Kubrick fan—where did you get your desktop background?
Awesome, glad you liked it. I’ve had that one for a long time, I did a search on the filename and there is a copy here: https://www.colipera.com/you-deserve-nothing/vector-2001_00359644/
I often struggle with how messy my desk becomes. My preferred style of note taking to work out a problem is a good pen and pads of paper, so things end up accumulating and I don’t feel like I want people to see my office. Thank you for sharing this picture! I’m right in the middle of reorganizing, or I’d show you how bad mine can get.
is that a speaker strapped to the bottom of the left monitor? If yes, why?
It is! It was an accessory that was available with that monitor and from what I recall, a lot of Dell business/professional monitors. Here’s what it looks like off the monitor.
oof, it’s been a long time since my last post
New country, new OS, ….
Desks
Work Laptop: MacOS Catalina Personal Laptop: MacOS Big Sur (MacBook Pro 13” M1)
Whoa! That’s a nice view! Having windows on three sides must provide you with a good amount of light!
They do! Echo is a problem though, I haven’t found a way to reduce it without covering the windows
I envy that view, beautiful!
What was the old country and the new country, if I may ask?
I went from India -> US -> Canada
I didn’t know how much I would like it here, it’s been surprisingly awesome!
Is that Vancouver?
Yup!
edit: should’ve lied, getting too close to being doxx’d
Giant monitor gang
I got tired of managing separate monitors, and went for this 4K, 42” Dell monitor a little over a year ago. I use BSPWM, so it’s like having 4 smaller screens but with almost none of the hassle or cables.
My keyboard is a Cooler Master “Storm QuickFire Stealth”, which despite the ridiculous name, is a pretty nice Cherry MX Brown 60%. I also have an Infinity Ergodox, also with browns (not pictured); but while it is fun for coding and would be really cool for gaming due to its programmability, it has some key sticking issues that prevent me from gaming on it. Before the pandemic, it was my keyboard at the office.
The mouse is a Logitech G600. While I don’t play MMOs, I still love having a ton of programmable buttons for other types of games, and for window manager commands.
Ergonomic seating is important if you program for a living, but new Herman Miller chairs are incredibly expensive. However, it was pretty easy to find this Aeron second-hand for less than half the price of a new one. Usually the only thing wrong with these is a busted lumbar support bar, but that is relatively cheap to replace.
The cat’s name is Seven of Nine.
What a clever solutions to the cat sleeping on keyboard problem ;)
I have both a Rhodia dotPad and a cat bed on my desk — I can attest that they’re both good accessories!
I started using yabai and came to a similar conclusion. Although I started with 2 huge monitors (34” Ultrawide Dells) and instead just stopped using the one. At east for me the problem was I ended up loving the windows auto-handled for me that I didn’t feel like dealing with dragging os x desktops/windows between the monitors. I have been thinking about using 1 at a 90 degree angle again, but ultrawide+90 degrees leaves very little wiggle room above the desk.
Just redid my keyboard: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErJimEYXUAIEoaC?format=jpg&name=large
That is a amazingly tacky. I love it.
My, erm, friend asks about the keycaps source…
Ahegao XDA keycaps from AliExpress
respect :D
My workstation is fairly standard.
One monitor hooked up to a kvm switch, the switch hooked up to my work/development laptop and to my gaming laptop.
Dev Laptop is a System76 Lempur Pro
Gaming Laptop is a System76 Oryx Pro
Both running PopOS 20.04LTS currently.
WM: i3
IRC Client: weechat
Shell: bash
Command Execuctor: rofi
Status bar: polybar
For password management I use password-store and the pass-clip extension to hook into rofi.
Keyboard: https://ibb.co/J3bz4zy
KVM Switch: https://ibb.co/gT91nJ0
Laptop Stand: https://ibb.co/dkWmbS7
ScreenShot: https://ibb.co/fqfm96k
Ha! I have a Lemur Pro (lemp9) as my personal laptop and an Oryx Pro (oryp4) as my work machine!
Yay System76! I just bought a Thelio and am SUPER delighted with it. Both the hardware itself and the excellent pre and post sales support.
I also love what they’re doing with Pop!_OS - the tiling window manager Gnome extension is a nice touch, although some accessibility bugs may have me falling back to my usual choice of Plasma or Elementary.
I’ve ordered myself a Tuxedo Pulse 15 (Tuxedo also works with a Clevo, or in this case Tongfang shell), can’t wait to get it and see what it looks like.
Fantastic! I think this trend towards Linux supporting hardware vendors is a SUPER exciting development for broadening the accessibility of open source operating systems.
Now if only the non KDE desktops would get on the accessibility bandwagon, we’d be in good shape :)
The Current Unedited Chaos: https://imgur.com/a/jS2VWnA
You say chaos, I say heaven :) That looks like some serious workspace.
A lot of the fun stuff isn’t visible – but most everything are day to day or at the least used weekly as part of all things Arcan development. Some of the major pieces (servers, android farm, … excluded):
Weird Input / Output Devices:
Capture/Measuring/Basic Electronics:
Displays (need to swap in something with DisplayHDR600 at least):
Laptops:
E-ink/Mobile/Specialized etc:
HMDs:
Essentially I have my personal/chat/music on the bottom screen and whatever I’m working on top:
Desk: https://i.imgur.com/lFhYSRr.jpg
Desktop: https://i.imgur.com/kHJzb0v.png
I use debian with i3+polybar on my thinkpad x240. I’m essentially living the memes. I’ve since moved to using weechat for irc.
I think you might enjoy the Telegram desktop application. It’s not an Electron blob, but rather elegant C++ application using Qt
I spy PADI books and dive tables. Had any opportunities to go diving recently? That’s one of the biggest things I missed out on this past year.
Here’s mine! http://imgur.com/a/Rz2wMk9
I’m currently away from home, so my picture is a little old, but nothing has changed. I use i3+polybar and a Dell XPS.
By the way, the XPS is a terrible computer and only god can help you if anything goes wrong with it. I had 6 consecutive trips to their repair location, with one repair breaking another component. I gave up after the 6th, because they replaced the laptop, and the microphone and trackpad broke within months.
Curious. Do you manage to prevent your mic from picking up the keyboard noise? What keyboard is that?
I just use push to talk. The keyboard is loud enough to be audible wherever I put the mic. It’s a Cooler Master Masterkeys Pro S, as dumb as that name sounds :P
well, I’m late to the party! Here’s my humble light-themed setup (only screenshot, sorry):
I use i3wm as my window manager. The editor used is Emacs, obviously. I’m working on a Gemini client, which is what you see in the first workspace. In the second workspace, I have my IRC client, lurch open, which I’ve been working on since about November of last year.
Ah, glorious. I’d love to see your bar config if possible :)
Thanks! You can find my polybar configuration right here.
OS: FreeBSD
Device: ThinkPad T480s
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8350U CPU @ 1.70GHz
RAM: 24GB
WM: WindowMaker
Screenshot: here
I always have an up-to-date page on my website regarding What I Use.
I JUST got my Macbook Pro back from my co-founder, which is Catalina, and I use it only for music/video.
I love that you are using WindowMaker! For me it mostly brings nostalgia, but I’m curious to know how it works for you! Like, why not OpenBox or Awesome? (example of floating/tilling wms)
And what about FreeBSD? I’ve used it for a while but not sure how it would work as a daily driver. How has your experience been?
I suspect that will vary quite a lot depending on what you actually need to do. I spend a lot of time these days in MS Office, and run Windows on my work laptop and desktop, but my work desktop has 48GB of RAM dedicated to a FreeBSD VM and pretty much all development that I do happens in that VM, occasionally checking things out in the host environment (with or without WSL) if the Windows or Linux CI jobs fail.
FreeBSD is gradually falling behind on a few things though. No official .NET Core port means no GitHub Actions, so CI is annoying. No supported Chrome means no supported Electron, so things like VS Code are all best-effort ports of the open source bit and a lot of things don’t work (e.g. no remote extension). No containerd port and so none of the Docker or similar ecosystems reach into FreeBSD-land. The last is the biggest problem because things are increasingly built on top of this. FreeBSD jails would be a much cleaner containerd back end than the horrible mess of namespaces, cgroups, and seccomp-bpf that Linux uses, but someone needs to do the work.
Jails was probably my absolutely favorite feature of FreeBSD. It was so much cleaner and intuitive than linux containers. Ports was also a favorite. Ever since I tried Gentoo, the ability to build my packages from source with whatever flags was something I enjoyed, except when I had to wait a couple of hours to compile X or Gnome…
I hated ports until Poudriere came along. It’s a shame; Poudriere does everything something like docker-build does, in a very clean way, but was never generalised to anything other than building the ports tree. It’s quite easy to set up Poudriere with a custom
LOCALBASE
to build a small set of ports and their dependencies with custom options. I’d love to see that better supported by the ecosystem.Here’s mine: https://i.imgur.com/KbplSyh.jpg
Basically my work machine is a lenovo carbon X1. That’s been my brand since 2013. Got a couple Lenovo monitors running @ 2560x1440. All accessories coming in through one usbc plug into the laptop that provides power, 2 monitor feeds, and a usb hub. External Keyboard matches laptop keyboard. Above all: no wireless bullshit. I got way too tired of flakiness and batteries. I run a debian variant with cinnamon, so pretty vanilla. Other than that I live in the webbrowser and emacs.
Desktop is occasionally used for bigger tasks or OSS development. I built it all myself, which was a fun learning experience. I basically just access it over ssh with x forwarding (It’s wired to the same switch as the laptop so X forwarding works reasonably well). It’s fairly overpowered.
I bought a Pinebook Pro a few months back and don’t regret it as it’s a noble experiment, but I suspect that in a year or two when the pandemic is over and I go back to actually needing to commute and travel, it’s just not gonna cut it, and a Lennovo is looking pretty compelling. It’ll be interesting to see if they release a laptop with some of the amazing low power / high perf AMD chipset stuff with integrated graphics that’s coming down the pipe.
tldr
A HP Envy laptop from 2016 (no the most powerful, hackable or ergonomic, but doesn’t give me any hardware pains). Ample RAM (8GB) and SSD (512GB). Sometimes hooked up to a mediocre 1920x1080 monitor and decent gaming keyboard and mouse I bought for my Raspberry Pi when I didn’t know better.
Running on it, Void Linux (glibc sadly) with dwm (I’ve essentialy scuffed my fork though), st and qutebrowser (best compromise: pretty flexible config and QtWebEngine is nice and modern). System’s using ~600MB right now with 4 tabs, 2 Neovims and a terminal open.
For chatting, weechat for Discord, IRC and Matrix. I like having everything in the same place, and Weechat resource usage is nothing compared to the leaky horrrors of all the Electron clients.
For editing, Neovim (I am losing my mind about Vimscript). I try keep it nice and simple. Used to use Gruvbox light (with hard contrast) but since today I’m using paige plus modifications (I like it).
aerc for email (much simpler than Neomutt, haven’t explored it enough though). For RSS, I use this script. FZF makes a pretty decent UI.
I’m trying out Nix[OS], Acme (love it but a bit of highlighting is nice) and Kakoune.
Also trying out Wayland and river.
The most useful small tools I use are abduco for {at,de}taching to terminals and fzf for building UIs (sounds silly but you can get quite far plus fuzzy finding rocks)
I used to maintain a dotfiles repo but I have better things to do than keep my personal stuff tidy for people on the internet. Still version it with Git though, autocommiting on each change (for safety). I feel nice though so:
zshrc init.vim qutebrowser config dwm config.h background
No guarantees
Fairly standard setup: https://imgur.com/gallery/5FNP11c
I run an X1 Carbon running 20.04 with work. My personal rig (read: gaming) is a 3700X + 6800XT in a FormD T1.
My area of most delight is peripherals. For work:
For home use:
I currently have a pre-order in for the new version of the UHKB and will try it for home use first.
The area I’m least happy with is the monitor. I like running a single monitor setup but prefer the freedom of more screen real-estate. I’ve been fence-sitting on an Apple Pro Display XDR purchase, but instead think it’ll be more likely I end up getting 2xLG GN950 on a Herman Miller dual monitor arm.
When I’m not standing I use the Mirra 2 from DWR and an ergorest.
https://kayode.co/noindex-kayodes-office/
Setup:
Items of note:
No screenshot due to a lot of personal/sensitive information but I’m running:
How do you like the remarkable 2?
I absolutely love it. It’s a digital notebook with some ereader capability. I’ve wanted something like this for years. It’s replaced the legal pads and notebooks I have laying around. The build quality of the hardware is fairly high and pen feel is amazing.
It’s very hackable as well. It runs Linux. The root password is in the help screen. Adding ddvk’s remarkable-hacks adds significant functionality that takes okay software to fairly decent software. Cloud syncing is similar to iCloud. It usually works fast but not instantly; sometimes it takes a bit.
The price is a bit high and the company is having growth issues in relation for support. For official accessories, get the Marker Plus. Having an eraser on the other end is worth the extra $50. If you’re looking to save money, skip the official cases. If you’re going to buy an official case, spend the $150 for the leather folio. It’s expensive and it definitely does not feel worth $150 but it makes the tablet feel like a moleskine notebook.
It’s not one thing that makes the reMarkable 2 amazing for me. It’s all the little things, including how limited it is. If you want a digital notebook you don’t mind doing a little hacking on, it’s truly amazing. If you want it to be anything else, you will be sorely disappointed, especially for the price.
The one big bug that is extremely painful: PDF annotations do not export properly unless the original pdf was in A4 page size. They only look correct on the tablet and in their apps. You have to make make a script to extract the PDFs and feed them though one of the libraries people have made.
Thanks for the honest and quite extensive reply. I’m still doubting to either buy a 1 or a 2…
This is cool, thanks! I like their readme section on Linux. Its just:
You got this
.I can’t speak for OP, but I absolutely love mine. I’ve tried various notebook replacement tablets in the past. I’ve always fallen back to paper. This is the first tablet that I’ve been able to fully replace all of my paper notebooks with.
Moved into a new house in September and finally got me a proper desk. This photo was taken to highlight the radio gear but it has the computer in there too :)
PC is nothing super special, I’ve got an aging (but still not bad) i7-4790K, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD for the OS, and a bunch of 3TB hard drives in RAIDZ5 for data. SSD prices have come down, but still not enough for me to stomach buying 12TB of them at once, so I’m still waiting.
GPU is an RTX 2070 which just showed up a few days ago. I had a 1070 which I bought back in 2016, and which broke in 2020. When I went to buy a replacement I got the bad news that even just to get another 1070 would cost more than it did four years earlier, so I put in a 1660 scrounged from another machine. This week I had a check come in so I gave in and bought a refurb 2070 for an acceptable price. Luckily the thing works.
Monitor is a Dell S2176DG (27”, 16:9), which I’m happy enough with. It’s a good size for this desk, and runs 2k @ 144fps with this desk. At my office desk (which I haven’t seen in the past 10 months) I have dual 4k monitors but I haven’t missed them very much. I use virtual desktops with convenient hotkeys so I can context switch very quickly, and it isn’t that often that I really care about seeing two things at once.
Keyboard / “mouse” is an IBM/Lexmark TrackPoint IV keyboard from the mid-90s, through a USB to PS/2 adapter. I have another one at work, I have a few of them laid in storage against breakage, and I will be very sad when I can’t find anymore. Nobody in this century makes a replacement that I find suitable.
Software choices:
Ham stuff in the photo (definitely also counts as part of the battlestation!):
You do mostly VHF/UHF stuff? What do you enjoy about those bands most?
I’ve finally gotten my extra and have been doing HF for the recent parts of the pandemic…
Actually I mostly enjoy HF. I get on VHF/UHF for the VHF contests, or to chase satellites, or just to talk to locals on the repeaters. But HF is more interesting to me. I have a 500’ skywire loop, a modified Hustler vertical (with a wire up into a tree to make it work on 160m), and a 120’ loop-on-ground as a receive antenna (no room for Beverages). I just didn’t mention all that stuff because it’s not in the photo and this isn’t ham chat :)
Ooh. Those are nice antennas. I’ve got a G5RV Junior and an 80 meter full wave dipole I made that I’m planning on fixing tomorrow. Nothing fancy, just lots of wire in the air. A slight trim of one side while installing it seems to have screwed up the resonance and no one can hear me on FT8, which I’ve been using to test my propagation recently. Or something broke while lifting it up, that’s all part of the fun…
Good luck :)
Have you done any exploring of the Flex from Linux? I’ve been starting to come up to speed with the current libraries and some of the proof of concept stuff that’s available around. Here’s one of the fun ones that I’ve seen stuff based on. I’ve just gotten access to a 6400 (not M) and have a local group that has some time reserved over the next four months to do some work on improving access from Linux.
https://github.com/hb9fxq/flexlib-go
Yes - I know Frank and I’m the author of https://github.com/kc2g-flex-tools/ :)
desk
More or less standard setup:
desk
I use a Caldigit TS3+ thunderbolt dock so I only need 1 cable to move between gaming machine, laptop and work laptop. I Recently added an adjustable arm for the monitor to get a bit more desk space back. Keyboard is a Razor Ornata Chroma, which is a hybrid mechanical and membrane - it feels really nice to type on.
Most machines are xubuntu based, but switched to i3wm when I started using ultrawide screens, and now it feels really alien on machines without i3.
Good weather battle station and Favorite background https://imgur.com/a/jD15aHl (Mbp13)
Desktop this is where I live (at least when the kids are sleeping). It is my “home office”, and I’ve worked only from home for a year now. I love it.
Just posted about it yesterday on my blog. A lot has changed since March.
https://imgur.com/a/DvFUyMR
Mac Mini from 2009 with Dell 4K monitor and Vortex Race 3/BTC 5100 und Evolument Vertical Mouse.
See also https://www.pahem.de/usesthis.html
awesome! didn’t knew the Mac mini from 2009 can support a 4k monitor :O
It’s 1080p, but enough for me.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CGkIh1ajohY/ – I often travel, so my warstation is mobile.
My main machine is Thinkpad X1 Carbon and I’m using Manjaro.
What keyboard and external screen is that? Out of interest which X1?
I’m one of those people whose desk collects random objects over time.
PC is a Shuttle DS67U, I think it has an i3 processor. I’ve always hated ‘fan’ noises (vacuum cleaners, electric motors of any kind) so going fanless (around 2017) is one of the upgrades I’ve been most satisfied with in a long time.
The desk itself is a ten year-old IKEA table. I’ve always used it as a desk, but now that I’m working from home full-time, I might cut off part of the apron, to allow myself to sit a bit higher.
Knowing how many of my coworkers have to work in the kitchen, on the couch, or share their workspace with others in their household, I’m incredibly happy to have a dedicated space of my own.
<3 those 4:3 monitors
I see a 100ISO film there! :)
Unfortunately, it has been slowly deteriorating for months because I don’t have good fixer atm :)
Whole desk, just the desk. I know, it looks horrible. But it’s comfortable enough. I do most of my work on an Intel NUC and a HHKB. I’m looking for a new chair though, can someone recommend anything?
I actually took a photo of my desk recently for IRC, it’s definitely not clean. :/
My office setup however.
I use a Mac at work. Screenshot would look like every Mac.
For home I have: OS: Arch (try-hard, I know. But it doesn’t get in the way)
CPU: i7-4930k
RAM: 64GiB DDR3
WM: Sway
MB: ASUS sabretooth x79
KB: Filco Majestouch (w/ royal kludge double shot key caps)
GPU: Radeon pro WX4100 (8x PCI)
Here’s a picture that I previously shared on Instagram: https://dl.koehr.in/battlestation.jpg
Here’s a screenshot that I previously shared on r/unixporn: https://dl.koehr.in/battlestation_scrot.jpg
The screenshot shows pretty much all the info, but I like how @duck_of_death put things together so I’ll shamelessly follow his example:
OS: Void Linux
Machine: Dell XPS 13 7390 (aka late 2019 Developer Edition)
CPU: Intel Core i7-10510U CPU @ 1.80GHz
RAM: 16 GB LPDDR3
WM: dwm
Keyboard: custom ErgoDox with bamboo case from falbatech
Water: Tap, but I also have a Soda Stream
Coffee: Black, single origin filter, preferably fruity
Whisky: Scotch, no ice
My physical space is rather quotidian, but I’m pretty pleased with my desktop hardware (https://pcpartpicker.com/list/2cNHJf )
Here is mine! https://imgur.com/67sQjkb
I realized that having one computer wasn’t enough so one if for work (i.e. reliable) and the other is where I can experiment and be free to break (or take two weeks installing Gentoo!)
Work PC: OS: Ubuntu 20.10 CPU: Ryzen 7 2700 Memory: 16 GB
Fun PC: OS: Arch Linux (maybe Haiku or ReactOS tomorrow?) CPU: Xeon E3 RAM: 16 GB ECC
I love having tons of light so a new screen bar light is on the way and quite likely some new keycaps! :-)
https://i.imgur.com/hgscg9W.jpg
And Work MacBook Pro
https://i.imgur.com/6H6wh0V.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/kU6TfAg.jpg
Laptop cat included.
Recent Mac, 2007 era 30” Apple monitor, Philips monitor vertical, Kinesis keyboard, Kensington vertical trackball.
Here’s this years’ edition, nothing censored. Largely the same as the last year edition. The big one is an early 34” ultrawide curved LG (3440x1440) and next to it I added (again) my old Dell U2412M with 16:10 ratio. Next to it all is my work workhorse, a fairly decent Dell work workhorse running corporate windows. I don’t very much like the laptop. What I’m especially happy about is coming soon, a Tuxedo Pulse 15 laptop I’ve ordered. It may even serve as a desktop replacement (to retire my old workstation with i7-4790k), but we’ll have to see how much I like it first.
I hope no-one minds, but I posted mine here since Lobsters doesn’t seem to support uploading and rendering media inline. I also started a thread there inspired by this one 🤗
Pretty basic.
It’s a cheap Dell 4k hooked up to my work MBP; the other keyboard and mouse are connected to the big Windows box under the desk.
I’m afraid Kinesis advantage keyboard cannot be qualified as basic :)
Fair! The Mac is running 11.1 and the big box under the desk, Windows 10.
Going into 2021, not a million miles different to this (June 2020): https://jmtd.net/log/study/study.jpg
I’m now wondering what, if anything, to change or improve. Oh, I might get an AMD workstation to speed up compiles. One significant improvement since June is using my Sony Rx100 mk3 camera as a webcam.
In terms of virtual desktop environment, I’ve only just discovered paperwm: https://jmtd.net/log/PaperWM/paperwm.png https://jmtd.net/log/PaperWM
Photo
Personal desktop on the left: Ryzen Hackintosh. Contains stuff. I’m not ‘into’ hardware and just want it to work, not cost too much money, and be quiet.
Big LG screen is lovely and close enough to ‘retina’ that it works for me.
Laptop on the right is MacBook Pro 15” 2015. I have one from work and I also own the same model, so I have a nice consistent setup.
Big Dell screen is lovely but not at all retina. The huge horizontal space is great for getting stuff done.
The split keyboard with orange letters and yellow cables is a Redox from Falba Tech with one of their lovely stained bamboo cases.
Random other stuff that’s in shot:
Not in shot:
Well here’s my workstation and a closer picture
I use mostly this two computers, both are pretty much the same in terms of software with KDE with 2bwm, polybar and rofi as launcher.
Work Laptop: Lenovo Thinkpad T430u
Desktop: custom build, details are on this screenie
Details on what’s on top of my desk:
Monitor: LG 29UM69G-B Ultrawide. Currently I don’t need more than one monitor, although I’d like to switch to a 16:9 1440p
Keyboard: Ducky One 2 Mini with MX Browns
Mouse: Logitech G305
Audio: Mic CAD GXL1200, UR22mkII audio interface and for headphones I switch betwween SACB1-SM and Sennheiser 4.50 BTNC
Camera: Sony a6000
Misc: KVM to switch between desktop and work laptop, two fake plants, some rock I got gifted, Yootech wireless charger.
Would you recommend using a Sony alpha like that for webcam usage? I’ve been curious about using something more adjustable for improving my exposure and lighting.
If you’re not going to do streaming or content creation there are cheaper alternatives, I just happened to have this one since I use it for photography. It’s a clear step up compared to a regular webcam.
When I did my research I found out there are some Canon alternatives which don’t require a capture card in order to work as webcam.
Since I just upgraded recently, I should post. I have one of the new Lenovo P620 Threadripper workstations:
Pictures here and here
The Windows install is almost unused except to run Capture One and edit photos. I used a MBP for editing until recently, but this machine is just too fast not to use it, so I needed Windows.
The Debian and FreeBSD configurations are almost identical. I’m running StumpWM, Emacs, and SBCL Common Lisp built from their upstream Git repos. Then I run Chromium, rxvt-unicode and tmux from the OS repo, and the Spotify app.
Calling someone’s workstation a battlestation is not nice. I hope people are not doing their jobs while thinking they have to fight everyday. And if your workstation is an actual battlestation, please find a different career, one without sowing destruction.
Linguistically, it’s derived from video gaming culture, rather than a literal battle.
Thanks for clarifying, I didn’t know the term was used in gaming.
Still, for example, ricing derives from the car tuning culture, but it still doesn’t make it good to use.
Omg, again somebody feels bad. Guys, guys, guys. Men, deal with it. It’s battlestation.