One Week With Desktop Linux After a 20 Year Absence

The tl;dr for this post is that I don’t know if I could use Linux as my desktop full time for web development. While there are many papercuts, the three main issues I can’t see a way around are: lack of integrated API documentation lookup (e.g. Dash.app), inability to customize keyboard shortcuts consistently across all apps, and the absolute tire-fire of copy and paste. … It turns out that running a devcontainer as root creates a lot of problems on Linux, and I figured the best way to truly solve them was to revisit day-to-day Linux. However, I have lost a lot of enthusiasm for messing with configs and trying to get something working on hardware not designed for it. ... ## The First Day Was Rough The first day with Linux was rough for me. Mostly due to two things: - Muscle memory of keyboard shortcuts that aren’t set up or do other bizarre things on Linux. This is purely my fault. - The trackpad/mouse configuration is woefully inadequate. Scroll speeds are 100MPH, acceleration is weird, and clicking with the trackpad causes numerous mislicks. Each click on either my Magic Trackpad or the laptop’s resulted in the mouse moving down a tiny bit. This was often enough to miss a click target. I have to assume Apple’s drivers account for this. … To use this full time for software development, however, a few things would need to change. Instead of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”, I’m going to list Dealbreakers, Papercuts, and Pleasntries. ### Dealbreakers There are three major issues that I would have to address to use Linux full time: clipboard craptitude, keyboard shortcut inconsistency, and API documentation lookup. … It sometimes just stops working and needs to be restarted, but it did exactly what I wanted. - Too many ways to install software. Sometimes you use App Center, sometimes you use `apt-get`, sometimes you download a file and dump it into your path, sometimes you do something else. This is how it was 20 years ago, and it still is like this and it sucks.