Tooling / 2025
One OS, Every Machine, Zero Regrets
People ask why I bother. Windows works, macOS works, everything works if you squint hard enough and don't ask too many questions. But "works" was never the bar I was aiming for. I wanted a machine that does exactly what I tell it, every time, without negotiating.
The current daily driver is a ThinkPad T14 Gen2, running Fedora with KDE Plasma. Dual boot, technically, because Windows 11 Pro still sits on a partition for the handful of things Linux won't touch cleanly, a couple of poker clients and streaming apps that just refuse to cooperate otherwise. Everything else, every real hour of work, happens on the Fedora side. Development, focus time, the home lab, all of it.
The setup isn't stock and it was never meant to be. Bash with a custom prompt, because the default one tells you nothing useful at a glance. bat instead of cat, eza instead of ls, small swaps that sound cosmetic until you realize you're staring at a terminal for six hours a day and every bit of friction removed there is friction removed from your actual thinking. Albert replaced the launcher, installed the long way around through an OpenSUSE build service repo because Fedora 43 didn't have a COPR build ready. The Super plus Space shortcut that should have been trivial turned into a fight with Wayland's global hotkey limitations, solved eventually through a KDE custom shortcut instead of the obvious binding. Small war, still counts as a win.
None of this is about being difficult for the sake of it. It's about the fact that a terminal doesn't hide anything from you. No mystery settings menu, no background process you can't name, no update that changes behavior without telling you why. If something breaks, and things do break, the terminal tells you exactly where and exactly why, and you fix it instead of restarting and hoping. That's not romantic, it's just faster, and after enough years of debugging other people's systems for a living, faster and honest beats pretty every time.
The old ThinkPad still running in the corner of the home lab is proof of the whole philosophy. It's underpowered by any modern standard and it keeps working because Linux doesn't demand new hardware to stay useful, it just asks that you understand what you're running. That's the whole setup, really. One OS, every machine, and the only real rule is that I have to understand it, not just click through it.