I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/

I'll be crossposting my posts here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 25 June 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/2022-06-25.txt

There was a good thread on bboard (in the UNIX board) this week about favorite
Desktop Environments on Unix-flavored machines, and I thought I'd cross-post
and expand on my thoughts here.

My primary computer is currently running GNOME with some customizations. I know
everyone likes to hate on GNOME, but I actually find it pretty good now. At least,
up to date GNOME. I feel like a lot of the frustrations with GNOME on, say, Ubuntu
is due to the outdated packages. I've migrated most of my Linux desktop usage to
Fedora and find that I rarely have the errors and bugs that I constantly had on
Ubuntu.

Besides, I'm trying out Silverblue (and really enjoying it honestly), and GNOME
is kind of required for Silverblue. (I know Kinoite exists now, but I haven't
had great experiences with KDE, so I thought I'd start with the normal Silverblue.)

I had kind of an interesting start with DEs- my first Linux distro was Ubuntu
Natty Narwhal. Unity was new and raw and bleeding and terrible. (So almost
everything has seemed great to me after living with Unity for years lmao.)

After a few years on vanilla Ubuntu, I migrated to Lubuntu due to the age of my
laptop at the time. I ended up getting pretty involved with the Lubuntu
distribution as a result. This was all pre-LxQt (which is abominable in my raw
opinion). But because of my involvement with the distro I've always had a soft
spot for LXDE and still use it on occasion.

Since then, I've bounced around a few things and eventually found the best fit
for me with GNOME, or at least, GNOME with some personalization, and fresh and
updated as possible as long as the hardware can handle it.

I do have one laptop that definitely can't handle it. It's currently on MATE
but I don't know that I'm really a fan of MATE. I don't use that laptop for
serious productivity (it's too small for most things - I mostly carry it because
it's so small but can still fire up a nice shell to home when I'm travelling.)

I also have played with XFCE and may want to give it a shot for real at some
point.

The thread on bboard did make me want to try some of the lighter-power
desktop managers that were mentioned in the thread. I've seen cool demos of
dwm, and I've known other people who swore by i3. I don't know much about
fluxbox, which was mentioned by several people - so maybe I will also add
that to my list to check out when I can.

But for now, I think I'm sticking with GNOME at least on this main computer
while I give Silverblue a good spin.

I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/

I'll be crossposting my posts here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 11 June 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/Another.txt

Well it's maybe time for another post, but I don't know what to write 
about.

Is there a thing I can do on gopher to automatically put my thoughts into 
words? I know this is a feature lacking on the web but I have heard good 
things about gopher, so I was hoping maybe it had this feature.

These lines are pretty long, huh. I wonder if gopher does word wrapping 
or if I'll have to come back and edit this later.

Isn't this a bit funny? How many times do I need to try to start writing 
while still not really writing much of anything?

I don't really have an answer to that, but as Dr. House said, you always 
look smarter asking the questions rather than dumbly not answering 
questions.

I'll come up with some more questions to not answer for my next post. 
Please look forward to it.

I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/
I'll be crossposting my posts here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 10 June 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/First.txt although as you will read it was originally written much earlier...

Originally written 4 October 2020.

10 June 2022 addendum: Yikes... for real? Have I really been just 
thinking about making a gopher for 20 months? Well, at least I've finally 
gotten around to putting it up.
----
Lately I've felt like I can't write anything more than a few sentences at 
a time, so I thought I would set up a little gopher hole here to try to 
get in the swing of writing again.

It's particularly devastating to me to have this mental block against 
writing since I was a writer all through college and studied creative 
writing as my major. Notice I didn't say "writer's block" - it's far 
worse than that. Writer's block usually connotes a block against writing 
in some project or work. But for me right now, it's practically 
everything. Work emails, social media posts, even to-do lists seem to 
paralyze me.

I can't figure out why or what caused this block. Is it as if once the 
word is written, I've lost control of it? I can't change it or take it 
back? It's also possible it's a result of the turmoil in the world right 
now. Maybe I'm so unsettled by what's going on out there that prevents me 
from getting in a writing frame of mind. Or maybe it's my general 
transformation from a creative person to a more conventionally-minded 
person. Or frankly, it might be because I've gotten worse at focusing and 
minimizing distractions.

In any case, I'm bothered by it, so I'll be trying this as a form of 
active practice. It has been some time since I've kept a written personal 
journal. Maybe this will help me to get over this slump.

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