Looking at it now, they haven’t linked to the source code anywhere so… yeah I wouldn’t trust it.

I’ve used pdfkit to considerable success. It has a few system-level dependencies, but the instructions are pretty straightforward:

# apt-get install wkhtmltopdf
$ pip install pdfkit

I’ve been using Linux for 25 years. I started with SuSe, switched to RedHat after a couple months, and after a few more months switched to Gentoo… for 10 years, then did Arch for the remainder.

Frankly, I think that distro hopping is a bad idea because it means you don’t get enough time really understanding how to fix things. As a long time Arch user, it would never occur to me to throw out 10+years of tooling and scripts, muscle memory and shorthand to fix a driver issue. I would read the wiki top to bottom and then go spelunking through other sources until I find the solution (then update the wiki) before I’d switch to something foreign with its own set of problems and unknowns.

My advice is to find a distro that makes sense to you, and that has a deployment pattern you like and commit to it for a few years. Don’t switch unless you find something that fulfills those two requirements even better, and even then do so cautiously. Your experience and understanding is hard-won.

Ooh! I have something for this.

Also Ctrl+D to exit any shell and Ctrl+R for reverse searching your history!

Just be careful with files with spaces in the name. There’s an incantation with xargs that I always have to look up when I want to use it safely.

Not in and of itself, but I find that I have a handful of common tricks that I can put into aliases. Also, there’s ffmpeg.app!

I’ve used Starship before, and while it’s quite powerful for formatting what goes into your prompt, I don’t believe there’s any feature in there that will fix the prompt to the top of the screen. The best I could find in the docs was a feature to place some text to the right.

Yes, that’s it exactly.

Hear me out: I want the prompt at the top of the screen.

It’s terribly inconvenient to have the place you’re typping your command into at the bottom. On laptops, your fingers are in the way, and on desktops, you’re always craning your neck looking at the bottom-left.

Imagine instead if your terminal looked like this:

| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| $ curl https://...
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| $ echo "hello"
| hello
| $ ls
| output.png
| goes.txt
| here.webm
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |

After a command is entered in the upper pane, it’s appended to the lower pane along with the output just like a normal terminal. Maybe even something like translating Shift+Enter to mean “clear the output pane and run”.

Could Wine help out here?

What is the deal with getting gpu acceleration into a terminal emulator of all things? Of all the innovations that we could use, faster drawing of text doesn’t feel like it should be a priority.

This is an excellent idea. Fortunately you’re not the first to have it ;-)

You should look into alias.

Torrent stuff in HD or 4K and play those files instead of trying to stream from a company that won’t offer better than 720p :-)

I used KDE for about 10 years, but switched to GNOME when 3 came out and haven’t looked back. It’s a little unusual if you’re coming from Windows, but I’ve found that once I let go of old paradigms like a start bar and icons and embraced multiple workspaces, that GNOME is pretty damned amazing.

You might want to consider using Docker. You can build an image on your normal machine, export it as a file onto a USB stick, and then transfer it to your air-gapped machine, import it there. Then running it is just docker run --rm my_image

You can do this for a whole bunch of programs in one image, or a separate image for each one.

The problem of unintuitiveness is sadly very common in Free software, but it’s getting better… in a few spaces anyway.

For an Apple Notes replacement, I would suggest looking at Joplin, which I use daily for everything from database diagrams to recipes. It has a built-in sync feature, supporting a variety of options, all encrypted. I used it with Syncthing, which admittedly isn’t very easy, but there are other simpler options.

Depending on your DE, you can have those no problem. You just symlink to the respective .desktop file for the program you want to run. So for example, if you wanna start Firefox from your desktop, you’d look for a file called Firefox.desktop on your system (probably living under /usr) and symlink to that from ~/Desktop.

Knowing how to fix my wife’s computer, or my parents’ computers, or my brother’s.

Actually, while it’s rather frustrating for them, it’s not so bad for me ;-)

The Framework 16 looks pretty great. Repairable & upgradable, discrete graphics (AMD), and guaranteed Linux support.