I suppose the most tangible benefit I get out of it is embedding a custom initramfs into the kernel and using it as an EFI stub. And I usually disable module loading and compile in everything I need, which feels cleaner. Also I make sure to tune the settings for my CPU and GPU, enable various virtualization options, and force SELinux to always remain active, among other things.

mpd + ncmpcpp

Yes! Awk is great, I use it all the time for text processing problems that are beyond the scope of normal filters but aren’t worth writing a whole program for. It’s pretty versatile, and you can split expressions up and chain them together when they get too complicated. Try piping the output into sh sometime. It can be messy though and my awk programs tend to be write-only

Yeah for me it’s been great and I do essentially leave it plugged in the whole time I’m using my PC (attached to my keys). It does require a pin entered each boot, so leaving it in would still offer security. But as someone else mentioned getting kwallet PAM working would make things easier in any case

Lol. I press a button on the device (which I unlocked with a pin before boot), but it would be nice to have the DB unlock automatically

Personally, I’ve relied on an OnlyKey for a few years (with backups and an extra fallback device) and haven’t needed to type passwords since. This doesn’t help with the number of prompts, but it does make them easier to dismiss.

I do use autologin, but I don’t use a system wallet (only KeePassXC, which I do need to unlock manually). Autologin with system wallets can be tricky, but I’ve had some luck setting it up in the past. You might want to check out this wiki for PAM configuration.

If you’re willing to spend the time to learn how to write custom policies, SELinux can be used for this, to some extent. It’s highly customizable and can sandbox your apps, but the process of doing so is quite complicated. I wrote a small guide on custom policy management on Gentoo in another comment if you’re interested.

There’s also apparently a “sandbox” feature, but I don’t know much about it. I just write my own policies and make them as strict as possible.

As an example, my web browser can’t access my home directory or anything except its own directories, and nobody (including my own user), except root and a few select processes (gpg, gpg-agent, git, pass) can access my gnupg directory.

This only covers security/permissions, and doesn’t include many of the other benefits of containerization or isolation. You could also try KVM with libvirt and Gentoo VMs; that works pretty well (despite update times) and I did that for a while with some success.

I learned by watching a bunch of cppcon videos, reading cppreference, and writing a lot of programs. Learning how to understand the error messages is also really important

Ah true! Thanks, yeah that’s a better way to do that. It seems I’ve developed a bad habit of going into visual more often than I need to- will keep an eye out for that

As a Vim/NeoVim user my number one reason is speed. There’s a pretty steep learning curve, but it doesn’t take long to see noticeable improvements.

Aside from terminal applications generally running faster than GUI ones, there is a tremendous amount of flexibility that it offers when it comes to actual text editing. For example, you learn how to type things like _f(vi(cfoo _f(ci(foo^† which goes to the beginning of the line, finds the first open parens, selects everything inside of the parens expression, then replaces that text with “foo”. After a while these kinds of inputs become second nature, and you can start using them to construct macros on the fly that can be applied to different places in your code.

One major downside is that it can take some configuration to get working the way you want it, especially if you want an IDE-like environment. NeoVim comes with a built-in LSP interface, which I’ve been able to get working pretty well for all of the languages that I use the most, but it’s still kind of a pain to configure.

I’m sure Emacs is similar, but I’ve never used it. I don’t think many people use Nano unless they need to edit something in a terminal but don’t know how to use Vim. On that note, being comfortable with a terminal editor means that you’ll have no problem if you’re SSH-ing into a server or using the TTY console.

^† _f(ci(foo avoids an unnecessary mode change, see comment below

I use Terminus (ter-112n) for TTY, Source Code Pro for terminal emulators, and DejaVu, Liberation, and Noto for others

Had the same issue with Plasma Wayland in QEMU but I never found a solution. Toggling anti-aliasing sometimes helped, temporarily

Yes! Depending on how much time you want to spend figuring things out… there is a learning curve, but the documentation is quite extensive. And you do learn a lot about Linux by diving in. The compile times aren’t really an issue today if you have decent hardware- I run it at home and on all of my servers (some of them not very powerful). You can do other things while it’s compiling.

It’s great if you want to customize everything and learn how your system works, or are interested in optimizing everything for your specific CPU architecture. There are a few pitfalls (especially when learning), but I’ve generally been able to learn how to fix any issues as they arise.

Also, the package availability is great. If you can’t find something in the gentoo repository or in an overlay, you can usually find its dependencies and build it yourself.

Also a fan of sway! Plenty configurable, and swaymsg+jq bash scripts can go a long way. Hoping we’ll see more development in lightweight DEs as well- Wayland is pretty great, and sway could use with some more features. also nice username :D

Absolutely! I haven’t had any problems setting up dependencies for various projects and have only needed overlays a few times. Sometimes USE flags can be tricky but most things are pretty well documented

Encourages hardware-based optimization and kernel specialization

Out-of-box security configurations supported by the organization (SELinux, hardening)

Excellent package and dependency management with a wide variety of up-to-date software