Vim/Neovim has orgmode too, these days 🤪

At times, I’ve also juggled (in addition to vim and tmux) hotkeys for my current tiling WM of choice and extra hotkeys to swap between machines via barrier. I’m not sure how I’m able remember what I had for breakfast, much less someone’s name.

Or even better, btop

Only community I truly care about that hasn’t budged is the Neovim subreddit still going strong without a care in the world. Everyone’s still highly motivated and active there, so it’s really the only place to go where I can keep up the the community’s momentum.

Honestly? This hole in the wall food store in my home town managed to pick up a pretty early release of the arcade game Robotron. I was instantly enthralled, visiting arcades any time I could. From there, I played on friends’ Atari 2600s and Commodores until I managed to get my own C64, and I’ve never stopped since. From there, I migrated through their products and stayed a diehard fan till the mid-90’s - C128, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, and Amiga 2000.

I played a few early x86 games on demo machines in stores, but I didn’t finally relent and build my own x86 rig until the release of the Descent 1 demo, which single-handedly destroyed all of my remaining resolve. I already considered myself a pretty consistent gamer, but that was the nail in the coffin. The rest, as they say, is history. It was only 4 years later that EverQuest came out, too, and that swallowed me whole.

Secret sauce: it’s much easier to get an employer on board with buying you a Thinkpad as part of a bulk order than it is to get them to spring for any of these more obscure models as a one-off.

I’ve tried three times to fully convert my gaming rig to Linux, sticking with the effort at least 3 solid months minimum each time. The first time was back in 2015. Only a small subset of my Steam Library worked, despite all of my best efforts hacking on bottles, and there was no way I could stick with it if I intended to play anything with friends. Community aside, Valve and Feral were leading the charge, but I could not stick with it.

My second attempt was around 2019. Almost half my library ran, some in need of care and feeding, others barely functional, but running nonetheless. This was primarily due to my curation efforts of trying to make sure the games I bought offered some slim hope of compatibility. Wine was still a very inexact science, so attempts to get things running outside of native ports or Valve games was a poor facsimile. WineDB representation of compatibility layers was a wide gradient of colors, with most AAA titles still squarely in silver territory or worse. Anything with anti-cheat was a fool’s errand.

My rig’s now been on Linux for 4 months solid, and the state of Linux gaming is nothing close to what it used to be. The state of EAC support thanks to Steam Deck represents a quantum leap all its own, and that wouldn’t have happened without Proton. The overwhelming majority of my Steam Library runs with no effort, each game running nearly as good or better than it did on Windows. This shift did not feel incremental.

I’ve used vim with a smattering of essential plugins for years to do this, and only this year moved to Neovim for the same.

It’s not Open Source, but I’ve also taken a hefty liking to Obsidian’s canvas mode. Likewise, I share a small selection of lists with my other half via Google Keep.

Legit. Piracy related to home PC software has been around since the advent of home PCs. Before the concept of LANfests or LAN parties even existed, there were copy parties. I still have vivid memories of 8+ 1541 drives daisy-chained to a single C64. University servers hosting warez… Usenet… there’s likely earlier examples I’m not aware of.

Before that, people were hacking phone systems in order to call long distance for free. This ain’t nothin new.

Not something I’ve indulged in for 30+ years, though. I pay for everything, now. Guilty conscience, I suppose. 😁

Only reason I’m holding on to my Windows partition at this point is for rare scenarios like needing to reprogram my VKB stick, which only has a Windows executable. Other than that, I’ve not fired it up in months. And I’m a pretty rabid gamer.

It’s taken a long damn time to get here.

AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.