Lodra

I'm ditching Windows in favor of Linux on my personal desktop. And so I'm looking for advice on which distro I should start with.

About Me

I use Linux professionally all the time but mostly to build ci/cd pipelines and for software development/operations. I've never been a Linux admin nor have I ever chosen the distro I use. I'm generally comfortable using Linux and digging into configs/issues as needed.

Planned Usage

I use this machine for typical home usage: Firefox, a notes app (currently Notesnook), maybe office style tools like word and excel. I also use this for gaming: Steam, Discord, etc. Lastly and least important, I use this for a small amount of dev work: VSCode, various languages, possibly running containers.

What I'm Looking For

I'd like an OS that's highly configurable but ships with good default settings and requires very little effort to start using. I don't want it to ship with loads of applications; I want to choose and install all of the higher level tools. Shipping with a configured desktop is perfectly fine but not required. Ideally, I can have all of this while still keeping the maintenance low. I think that means a stable OS, a good package manager, stable/automatic updates, etc.

Last bit. Open source is rather important to me. I prefer free and free.

Anyone have good suggestions??

Edit

I'm aware of tools like Distro Chooser. They've recommended Arch Linux and Endeavor OS to me so far. But I'm not ready to trust them yet. I'm looking for human input.

Edit 2: Hardware Info

I'm running on an ASUS ROG Strix GA15DK. It's just over 2 years old. The hardware was shiny but not top-tier at the time. It’s not new at this point but also not old by Linux standards.

• AMD Ryzen 7 5800X Processor
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
• 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM

Edit 3

It's official. I installed EndeavourOS! I got it to work without any issues. Yup, first try. It definitely didn't take me ~10 tries :D

Thanks for all the input all! Wonderful crowd here!!!

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/1562654

FYI to all the VS Code peeps out there that malicious extensions can gain access to secrets stored by other VS Code extensions as well as the tokens used by VS Code for Microsoft/Github.

I really don’t understand how Microsoft’s official stance on this is that this is working as intended…

If you weren’t already, be very careful about which extensions you are installing.

Here's an upcoming feature for those wanting to use multiple profiles in VSCode but don't enjoying micro managing settings across many different profiles. And good news: This feature is currently being developed!

The feature request is Extend from the Default Profile. The idea is to allow users to organize settings into various layers. Global settings in the default profile. Maybe python specific settings in a python profile. And then golang specific settings in a golang profile. Or however else you want to organize things! This will be a huge help when working with many different workspaces and languages which all need little adjustments.

This idea actually dates back all the way to November, 2016! While it has nearly 600 votes, nobody implemented the feature. Thankfully, the new feature (again, issue 156144 was requested about a year ago and was actually a part of the Iteration Plan for June 2023. Unfortunately, it wasn't completed in time (that's ok! Thanks devs!) and was pushed to the July 2023 iteration. Hopefully, we'll have this feature released soon.

If you're as excited as I am for this one, then vote for the feature with a thumbs up.

Yes, it's already in development but votes can make this feature a priority. You can also vote for specific implementation details too!

• Accessibility improvements - Accessible View for better screen reader support, Copilot audio cues.
• Better editor group and tab resizing - Set min tab size, avoid unnecessary editor group resizing.
• Skip subwords when expanding selection - Control whether to use camel case for selection.
• Terminal image support - Display images directly in the integrated terminal.
• Python extensions for mypy and debugpy - For Python type checking and debugging in VS Code.
• Remote connections to WSL - Connect to WSL instances on remote machines using Tunnels.
• Preview: GitHub Copilot create workspace/notebook - Quickly scaffold projects and notebooks.
• New C# in VS Code documentation - Learn about C# development with the C# Dev Kit extension.

This is the first of a (hopefully) recurring series where we showcase extensions that are likely unknown to most users. Starting with patricklee.vsnotes!

Marketplace Description

VSNotes is a simple tool that takes care of the creation and management of plain text notes and harnesses the power of VS Code via the Command Palette.

Why I like it

VSNotes seems to be built for frequent note taking. E.g. Taking daily meeting notes and keeping them organized. There are quite a few alternative extensions like dendron.dendron that do this quite well but are much more complicated. I like VSNotes for its simplicity. It's easy to use.

More importantly, I don't want to create a large number of notes. I just want to manage a few organized files and have them accessible at all times. Here's a screenshot from my work laptop.

No date stamps. No tags. No subdirectories. Nice and simple. Having these notes embedded in VS Code gives me the expected benefits like markdown syntax and preview. But my favorite part is the Activity Bar icon (far right in my screenshot). These notes aren't stored in my active workspace. They can be but I choose to store these notes in ~/notes instead. This means that the files within that directory are globally available regardless of which workspace is active. If you work with many different repositories and workspaces, this is fantastic!

A few use cases

• Basic notes that are always open... duh. So you don't have to send yourself messages in Slack
• Commands.md: Some bash magic. Some kubectl favorites. Some fancy git commands. All copy/paste-able into the embedded terminal
• Diagram.d2: I manually set the file extension. Now I can preview terrastruct.d2 diagrams conveniently!

My Configuration

{
  "vsnotes.defaultNotePath": "~/notes",
  "vsnotes.defaultNoteTitle": "{title}.{ext}",
  "vsnotes.noteTitleConvertSpaces": "-",
}

First and foremost everyone, welcome to our new little community!

I've watching the subscriber count climb slowly over the last ~36 hours from 0 to the current 64 subscribers. Exciting stuff! And impressive too, given that we don't have any content yet 🙂

So I'd like to hear from the crowd. What content do you want to see here? Maybe some periodic posts like monthly patch notes? Reply with your ideas!

First post to get the community going. Here's the list of extensions that I personally use. Most are disabled globally and enabled per project. Feel free to ask questions, give me suggestions, etc.!

Edit: Thanks for the good idea on formatting @NostraDavid. I also converted my list to urls

code --list-extensions | ForEach-Object {" - [$_](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=$_)"}

• albert.TabOut
• arcticicestudio.nord-visual-studio-code
• be5invis.vscode-custom-css
• Boto3typed.boto3-ide
• BrandonKirbyson.vscode-animations
• bungcip.better-toml
• DavidAnson.vscode-markdownlint
• eamodio.gitlens
• ecmel.vscode-html-css
• EditorConfig.EditorConfig
• exiasr.hadolint
• GitLab.gitlab-workflow
• golang.go
• hashicorp.terraform
• maptz.camelcasenavigation
• ms-azuretools.vscode-docker
• ms-kubernetes-tools.vscode-kubernetes-tools
• ms-python.black-formatter
• ms-python.flake8
• ms-python.isort
• ms-python.pylint
• ms-python.python
• ms-python.vscode-pylance
• ms-vscode-remote.remote-containers
• ms-vscode.makefile-tools
• ms-vsliveshare.vsliveshare
• mushan.vscode-paste-image
• patricklee.vsnotes
• rebornix.ruby
• redhat.vscode-yaml
• ritwickdey.LiveServer
• streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker
• Terrastruct.d2
• vscode-icons-team.vscode-icons
• wingrunr21.vscode-ruby
• yzhang.markdown-all-in-one