90s was Mandrake, early 2000s was all about Ubuntu.

Since then I’ve tried just about everything including BSDs. It’s all pretty much the same thing, as long as you like the package manager and release schedule. I don’t like snap or flatpak so avoid distros that use them a lot.

These days I mainly just use opensuse leap, although I love arch etc but it’s just too much work for me now.

I only really need a terminal, firefox and emacs and I’m happy.

Not always, I have one with an amd chipset that I can’t get Linux on (last time I checked).

You have to open them up and remove a screw then install different firmware.

The dell Chromebook 11 I got from eBay for under £20 was easy to get it working on though.

It’s just a general system setup and config tool. I’m assuming that, like me, you already know how to do all that stuff without yast but it’s good for newbies and people that aren’t super nerds. With all of the anti terminal stuff I always read about on the internet you’d think at least ubuntu would have their own version of it or something similar.

“YaST is a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server tool that provides a graphical interface for all essential installation and system configuration tasks. Whether you need to update packages, configure a printer, modify firewall settings, set up an FTP server, or partition a hard disk—you can do it using YaST.”

But yeah, I actually hardly ever use it myself.

I’m always shocked that other distros haven’t made their own version of Yast from opensuse

I haven’t tried for years but vst’s are pure pain on Linux.

Have you tried bitwig studio? It has a native Linux version and is incredible. Vst will still be shit (if they are even supported) but if you master bitwig you probably won’t even need them.

OpenSuse leap

Yep I read about that when I first looked into exwm and it is a problem. I’m lucky though, I only really use emacs and firefox so it’s not a big deal for me. I wouldn’t want to be using exwm if I was doing some serious multitasking and using video editing software or something. I don’t know if there are plans for a multithread rewrite of emacs but I hope it happens.

I’m going to set up lem.el at some point! I currently use elfeed to see lemmy posts from the communities I’m most interested in and firefox to comment or just browse about. I actually saw this post from inside elfeed originally.

For the tables you can do ‘M-x org-table-create’ which then asks you for dimensions and makes it for you.

I think org-capture might help you with the other stuff, you can set up templates and access them by pressing ‘C-c c’ and get it all inserted in whatever org file and under whatever heading you want.

Org mode changed my fucking life! I looked into using emacs as a simple markdown editor when I was doing a creative writing course and discovered org mode. 4 years later and I never leave emacs, everything is done through emacs and org mode. I even use it as my window manager (exwm). I bought an old chromebook to turn into an emacs machine and it’s so good. It’s an operating system and I don’t like using a computer without it.

Some things for you to look into that I now can’t live without:

Elfeed

Org-capture and capture templates

Dired

EXWM

Syncthing (not a part of emacs but means I don’t have to use closed source cloud backups)

I passionately love emacs. At first I thought all they shortcuts and keybindings were a bit insane but they are second nature to me at this point. Emacs has also saved me lots of money that I would have spent on silly writing apps and aids.

It’s just what you’re used to. To me fedora seems weird and I don’t know why people choose it over opensuse. To me opensuse feels like home.

Also yast is great and I don’t get why more distros don’t have a similar thing.

I like it, it’s an Ubuntu lts with a nice theme (I wish it had grey instead of just black and white though), wine integration to run compatible windows software and it’s always just worked for me.

I don’t like the fact that some things are locked out unless you pay for the pro version but I think that’s just layouts and stuff.

I’d say it’s good but like all of these Ubuntu derivatives you’re almost always better off just using Ubuntu. Even people changing from windows to Linux, I’d still just tell them to use Ubuntu.