My 2024 setup

Unlike most, I don't have a fancy desktop setup due to my nomadic lifestyle so a laptop is the only one that I can rely on to stay connected on the go.

My seasonal trusty companion from my oldie university days has been the Dell XPS 9570. Recently, I've switched to its successor, the 9520. Sure, the Nvidia graphics might drain the battery faster and occasionally the driver's upgrade was painful when it didn't boot, but hey, sacrifices must be made for other GPU-heavy-compting tasks.

BTW, I ran dual boot on this machine one for Linux and the other for Windows. So that I can make use of all of that external Nvidia GPU's power.

For coding, I've been rocking Neo Vim for over two years now, and it's been a blast - I just fell in love with Vim motions.

I use Opensuse Tumbleweed to stay up to date with the new packages, and kernels while keeping the whole system rock solid. This distro coming along with BTRFS and snapper has been a dream. Rollbacks are a breeze, and the FSHS system is way "saner" than what I experienced with NixOS in the past I can also avoid the headache of setting up the entire environment back when I was using Arch. The Nixos problem with aws s3 cost makes me hesitate to try it again but if things settle down for like 2 years, I will probably give it a go.

Plus, I can use nix and still get to leverage the power of nix-pkg in Opensuse. (Though, gotta admit, those libgl issues can be tricky, solved by nix-wrapper-gl or switching to AppImage/Flatpak if needed.)

With nix on top of OpenSUSE,The new rust-based core-utils package sits happily on top of this setup, without any breakage. Though, my laptop comes with Nvidia, which means sticking to X for now, no Wayland just yet.

Also Opensuse's KDE integration is top-notch, and it comes with the pretty handy tool the KDE Connect App. That go along well with my android phone.

And when it comes to dotfiles, Tuckr is the tool that I used to keep things organized. ✨ Though I've still tried to figure out how to integrate nix and home-manager with Tuckr.

I also dual-booting with Windows to keep me covered for productivity with Office and have fun with Steam games.

Here are my list of programs or packages as you might say that I think they are pretty handy to keep them around:

• My primary shell is fish. Its fuzzy file finder and auto completion are good and the fish lang itself are easy to write some simple scripts.
• uutils-coreutils to replace the coreutils. So that my scripts can transferred between OSes without any pain 🤭
• direnv to keep environment variables stay at their places.
• zoxide to replace cd help to navigating around easier
• fzf is only used in my neovim to find the files around a project
• bat is super charged version of cat which support colored syntax
• fd is alternative of find. That's much faster
• eza is also a good alternative for ls for quick directory listings

My primary browser is Firefox but for the chromium version I use Brave. I think they're good browsers that comes with some built-in privacy features. Main extension that I am using are:

• Bitwarden - For keeping my password safe

• Ublock origin - To block ads in firefox

• For customization, I've used both Stylus and Dark Reader to avoid light-themed website.

Hope you find that interesting. And you got some inspirations about what should you do to improve your own setup.

Later, until next time!