For me, I really want to get into niri, but the lack of XWayland support scares me (I know there’s solutions, but I don’t understand them yet).
Also, I stopped using Emacs (even though I love its design and philosophy with my whole heart) because it’s very slow, even as a daemon.
Btrfs. I’ve been using ext4 for so long, I’m afraid that switching up will just annoy me.
Zsh: same reason.
Perhaps you are a more discerning filesystem user than I am, but I don’t think I’ve actually noticed any difference on btrfs except that I can use snapshots and deduplication.
BtrFS has Stuff.
Fun story: once I needed to do something (resize? can’t recall) a partition that happened to be in use. The solution involved
smbmounting a network disk,losetuphelping transform that thing into a virtual disk, then migrating the root FS there, recreating partitions, all while running the rootfs on that thing. Thus, pooling can bu useful.By the way, what does Zsh have over bash that you find useful?
Not OP , but regarding zsh, it has much better auto completion, and suggestion support. Additionally you can theme your prompt much more, see for example powerlevel10k
Honestly, the only btrfs feature that interests me is the snapshotting, as the current state of my backups is rather sub-par. There’s just a lot of inertia involved in adopting it when ext4 Just Works™. Maybe next time I install a new system I’ll give it a shot.
As for zsh, I rather like the general “intelligence” I see on others’ machines: the way it autocorrects typos, draws a navigable menu for tab completions complete with colour highlighting… it looks lovely. I’ve been a Bash user for 25 years though, and muscle memory like smashing the tab key to get what I want is a hard habit to break.
zsh has vi mode
FWIW, the excellent ZSH Quickstart kit has been splendid for my transition.
Actually, tutorials like that are a big reason that I don’t want to switch. The first steps are things like:
…and all I hear is: “this stuff isn’t ready yet” and “I’m going to be staring at Unicode glyphs the next time I have to tinker outside of my GUI”.
If I can’t easily and securely install a shell on every environment I use as I don’t want to be constantly context switching, then I’m going to have to stick to Bash.
This really isn’t a zsh problem, but a “people putting too much stuff in a ‘getting started’ config”.
I used zsh for 15 years before looking at any plug-in manager, you can get a lot of the good stuff like the completion by just going through the first-run wizard included in zsh. A lot of stuff is included directly with zsh, including various prompt themes (which is what that tutorial wants extra fonts for, because they use a fancy prompt with custom glyphs; I don’t think any of the built-in ones need that)
Things like fuzzy history search with fzf is usually included with fzf’s distro package and the additional zsh-completions package for less used or newer commands is also packaged by most distros. In my experience, a lot of the other plugins are stuff that could be a standalone script instead of a plug-in anyway.
Well that’s much more encouraging. I may just give it a try if the first run wizard is simple enough. Thanks!