I recently returned from a 3-week trip to Broome to escape the awful Melbourne weather. The first week I worked remotely and the latter two were holiday. A week before leaving I acquired a new laptop: a Huawei MateBook X Pro (2018). In the days before heading off I worked to set up the new machine into a state that would allow me to perform all my work duties. I wanted to take the new laptop as it is considerably lighter and smaller than the XPS 15 it's replacing.

To make things even more interesting instead of going for my tried and true Arch Linux setup I wanted to try out Void Linux. Specifically the musl libc variant. This post describes the trial by fire that the laptop and Void Linux received on this trip.

Since publishing, A Tiling Desktop Environment, I've continued to think about the topic, absorb the comments I received, try out some of the suggestions, and poke around the code bases of some existing window managers and Wayland compositors.

This weekend I set up a new website to document the thinking and research I've been doing. It's called Desktop Institute, and has a fun domain: desktop.institute. Check it out for a more info on what I have planned as well as a roadmap for future posts.

I've been thinking about graphical shells recently. One of the great things about open source desktops is there is a plethora of choice when it comes to graphical shells. However they seem to fall into two camps:

1. Full featured desktop environments that stick to the conventional stacking window metaphor.
2. Narrowly featured window manager based environments that include tools like tiling window managers often optimised for efficient keyboard use.

This is the sixth post in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. The previous post in the series recapped my first year away from Mac OS and my move to FreeBSD on my desktop computer.

The search for the ideal desktop continues and my preferences evolve as I gain more experience. In this post I summarise where I'm at two years after switching away from Mac OS. This includes leaving FreeBSD on the desktop and switching from GNOME to Awesome. I'll cover the motivation, benefits, and drawbacks to giving up a complete desktop environment for a, "build your own", desktop.

This is the fifth post in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X.

A bit over a year ago I wrote about my search for an alternative to Mac OS and switch to Linux. In this post I reflect on how that year went and detail some further adventures into Mac OS alternatives.

This is the fourth post in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. Part 3 was about finding replacements for some of my favourite Mac productivity apps.

This is the third post in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. Part 2 was about my experience with elementary OS and the switch back to Arch Linux.

I received a lot of great responses to the last post, thanks to all that commented, emailed and shared the post. I'd like to particularly call out the comment that Daniel Foré, the founder of elementary OS left on Reddit:

I gave a short (10 min) talk at work on my adventures with Linux. It covers the same core content as the post, Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X — Part 2.

This is the second in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. Part 1 was about evaluating 13 alternative operating systems and then choosing one to use full time. The selected OS was elementary OS. The motivation for this change is to get access to better hardware since Apple is neglecting the Mac lineup.

This is the first in a series on finding a replacement for Mac OS X.