Long Overdue Icebreaker/Introduction

The Water Cooler
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Hi there everyone. 28 y/o Male, from US - North Carolina, relocated to Atlanta-Metro area for work. I am currently pursuing a BSBA in Business Admin. and working full-time as a licensed property & casualty insurance sales/serviceperson. No computer science, engineering, or programming background – but I do like cool tech. and I’m fairly computer savvy.

Interested in crossing-over to IT, I feel inclined to data science/analytics. I would love to grow and become a competent admin. However, I’m unsure about the extent of GNU/Linux use within my current company.

I’m actively Studying for CompTIA Linux +, LPIC 1/2 & RHCSA, excited to take on the new challenge and hopeful about what sort of opportunities it will qualify for me to step-into and experience.

Current daily driver(s) (Fedora 42, XFCE on Bee Link SER5 & Dell Latitude E7450)

+ Testing (NixOS 25.05 on Lenovo IdeaPad)

My introduction to Linux was on Endeavour OS +/- Nov. 2023. I really do appreciate their community and even preferred their terminal-centric approach; I was warmly welcomed and assisted - however, due to my own “skill issue” it didn’t take long to break my GRUB.

Nothing that was Debian based (Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) would successfully install on my strange Lenovo IdeaPad (that I now use as a “server”) so I promptly migrated over to Fedora before that Christmas and it’s been home since. (F39 +)

Fedora has been a great bed to learn & tinker, I started getting to know BaSh, making VM’s, playing around with docker, and just digging down the rabbit-hole altogether - jumping into learning Python, MariaDB, etc.

Fedora has been a great balancing point between “bleeding edge” and “stability”. I’ve grown very comfortable with it. I have -zero- problems getting work done day-to-day, with school (outside of when Windows environment required for monitored exams), or playing games, art/photo editing, hobbyist music/video production etc.

I started with the flagship GNOME but didn’t love the design choices; and didn’t really want the additional dependencies of KDE so I chose the XFCE spin. I’ve gradually started to experiment with Tiling Window Managers (Qtile) but have recently also been very curious about Wayfire and playing around with Nix / Nix OS.

GNU/Linux & FOSS community really changed my views about personal-computing and totally made me more aware of analyzing and exercising more choices in a variety of ways. I’ve already started advocating for FOSS alternatives to family/friends. I appreciate the plethora of knowledge, and downright goodwill that everyone shares with one another. I hope that I will grow to be more useful and find ways to contribute - Thanks to all you developers, staff, users who report issues, etc.!

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Welcome to Fedora!
Sway is a fantastic WM, great mix of command line and GUI outcomes.
There is just enough help to sort out problems and the minimalism really helps in trouble-shooting or more so in not having things break.

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Thanks so much for the welcome and suggestion! :grinning_face:

I’ve heard/seen tons of great things about Sway. The only thing that deters me is that it’s manual instead of dynamic tiling.

I understand the Wayland support is “developmental’“ in Qtile so Sway is definitely way more predictable/stable in that sense.

I’m sure I could overcome the initial quirks in the manual tiling paradigm. But again Qtile config. being in Python was another factor that drew my interest.

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Back when I still used Qtile, i only used wayland backend. I never had any problems related to it.

The only problem i encountered that was relevant to wayland, was that if you make a function to increase/decrease windows gap, if you set a gap as too big it can crash compositor. I imagine most people to never run into this problem :laughing:

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Gotta say your avatar is neat, perfectly fits and the contrast / colours are fantastic. Did you steal it (as I say, good artists borrow, great artists steal) or are you a deft hand in design too?

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Very flattering! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: I’d like to think that I’ve got at least some artistic skill - I’ve started to design and make a few vector graphics (Inkscape). But indeed, this is stolen from Twitter / X (Twemoji 14.0)

I’ve been blown away at some of the 3D artwork and animations people have been able to produce with Blender - another great example of FOSS that I would like to learn!

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Sway places and sizes tiles automatically within the layout (vertical/horizontal). It chooses that layout based on screen aspect ratio. What it does not do is automatic column+row layouts. You can do your own vertical and horizontal splits, of course - the only splits I can do, huh!

So maybe that’s semi-dynamic?

In any case, for me it was the perfect “i3 replacement” when switching to wayland, but these days you can even teach Gnome to do tiling! I found it to be super reliable, but requiring some config to get started. The Fedora sway spin (or it’s configuration) gives you a smoother start than rolling your own (check dnf list sway-config*).

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