Hello from Linux Mint!

I’ve been using tiling window managers, exclusively, for the past 13 years now. Almost 10 of those years, has been with the same window manager. My setup have seen only minor changes and I’ve been using the same theme for past 8 years. It has, obviously, been a great setup for me, and it still is, but it sometimes gets quite boring to use the same setup, year after year.

Eventually, I decided that it would be fun to try out something completely new and different. Something with a bit more eyecandy to it, even if it would mean a less ‘productive’ option. I don’t spend much time at my computer these days anyway, and computers should be fun to use!

Something that looked good out of the box was important for me, as well as a system that I’m familiar with. It also needed to be something that had proven themselves to be a reliable project over a long period of time. And it needed to be something that was beginner-friendly. I didn’t want to spend time learning something new, and I didn’t want to spend time modifying the looks of it, other than minor tweaks. I wanted something beginner-friendly, because I didn’t want to have to care about anything. Everything should just work.

With Gentoo—everything—is about choices. Which is great. If, you want a custom-built operating system that’s 100% tailored for you, by you. It also means that you get to/need to make a lot of decisions and choices. That can be a lot of fun, but I don’t feel like that’s something for me, at least not at this point in life.

My initial impressions

I haven’t been using Linux Mint for more than a week or so, but it has been a fun and rewarding experience so far. Linux Mint, both looks and works just great! Let’s just hope that it stays that way.

The desktop environment, which is called Cinnamon, has been a pure joy to use. I was honestly sceptical about finding a desktop environment that would make sense and work me, but so far, everything seems to work just fine. I really don’t have to use the mouse for any window management at all. Which is equally surprising as pleasing for me. I really like all the manual semi-tiling features it comes with.

It seems like there’s a lot of features and settings in Cinnamon. I have been able to make a lot of tweaks and changes, that makes things work a lot better for me, and how I want things to work. The only thing I couldn’t find, was a way to centre windows. Thankfully, that is easily fixed with the tool xdotool and this handy Bash-script (that I found, somewhere, on the Internet, a long time ago, and I have no idea who wrote it):

#!/bin/bash

IFS='x' read screenWidth screenHeight < <(xdpyinfo | grep dimensions | grep -o '[0-9x]*' | head -n1)

width=$(xdotool getactivewindow getwindowgeometry --shell | head -4 | tail -1 | sed 's/[^0-9]*//')
height=$(xdotool getactivewindow getwindowgeometry --shell | head -5 | tail -1 | sed 's/[^0-9]*//')

newPosX=$((screenWidth/2-width/2))
newPosY=$((screenHeight/2-height/2-29))

xdotool getactivewindow windowmove "$newPosX" "$newPosY"

It almost feels like cheating when I use a desktop environment with graphical tools and applications for everything. Pairing my Bluetooth headphones? No worries. It’s just a few clicks away. No more spending time reading the manual pages, and trying to remembering some commands, that I’ll probably forget about until next time anyway.

The one thing that I don’t like with Cinnamon, is the menu. It’s too… modern? I miss a good old classic menu. Something that you would find in an older version of Xfce.

The future for Gentoo

Gentoo is still around. I have no plans on abandoning Gentoo, but for now, it’s in maintenance mode only. And who knows. Some day, I might get bored with Linux Mint, and would like to go back to Gentoo again.