The way I work in 2021

Lean and mean

I've used Linux as my desktop system for 21 years now, starting my voyage with GNOME1 and RedHat 6.1, using lots of different distros, desktop environments, apps and scripts. I hope you enjoy reading how I've set it up and don't hesitate to send me feedback or suggestions.

Operating system - Debian GNU/Linux buster/stable

After using RedHat the first two years, I started with Debian Potato back in 2001 and apart from a year using Arch, haven't used anything else.

For work, I've used a lot of RHEL, CentOS and Ubuntu (as well as some Solaris, FreeBSD, SuSE) but I've never been tempted to move away from Debian on my own machine. It's stable, rock solid and I know my way around it.

The drawback of Debian stable, is that the software is old. I'm normally 2 years behind my Arch, Ubuntu and Fedora using colleagues. To mitigate this, I run LXD system containers with Ubuntu, CentOS or whatever I need to get an environment with the versions I need.

But my base, the rock I build on, that stays at Debian stable.

This approach of using LXD when I need newer software is new. In the passed, I've used APT pinning and pulled in newer packages from Debian's testing and, occasionally, unstable pools. The problem is that the system quickly becomes more testing than stable.

A better approach, I find, is to use backports, but I currently appreciate having a simple sources.list with only the stable pool + security. I have a feeling my system is more stable with only sources from stable (no pun intended), but I haven't re-installed my machine enough to have evidences of this. It's just a gut feeling.

Desktop environment - i3

Login manager - XDM

The more fancy ones like GDM have security issues and have botched my Bluetooth setup more than once, besides, I don't really need to switch DE, I'm happy with i3.

After logging in, my environment is set up with this .xsession script.

Text is king

Sometimes, I use my laptop as my main machine, other times, I ssh into it and use it as a remote workstation. I therefore set up as much as possible in text mode.

Colours

Text based Linux shouldn't stand much back from GUI based Linux IMO. To achieve this, it's paramount that everything supports 24 bit colours so that we get the same amount of colours GUI apps get to play with.

Create a termcap file for 24 bit colours

Create a xterm-24bit.terminfo file as is described in the GNU Emacs FAQ and installed it in your local termcap registry with:

$ tic -x -o ~/.terminfo xterm-24bit.terminfo

Set TERM to xterm-24bit

You can now use the above termcap file by setting the TERM environment variable. You can either export it (put export TERM=xterm-24bit in your .bashrc) or just put it in front of the command you want to run with 24 bit colours:

$ TERM=xterm-24bit emacs -nw

Low latency SSH sessions

Compile mosh from source to get 24 bit colour support.

First, install dependencies:

# apt-get install \
    autoconf \
    protobuf-compiler \
    libncurses-dev \
    libssl-dev \
    pkg-config

Then compile and install mosh from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh
$ cd mosh
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su -
# make install

This gives you mosh with 24 bit colours which lets my use the most colourful editor colour themes, and they're indistinguishable from the GUI version.

Open links displayed on remote server in desktop browser

The Kitty terminal has this covered out of the box. If a URL is anywhere in the terminal, I can open it by doing Ctrl + Shift + e and selecting which URL by the number Kitty has inserted.

Have remote Emacs open links in the desktop browser

When links are rendered in Emacs, for instance when reading email in mu4e or viewing notes in org-mode, the URL is hidden, like on a web page. When running a GUI Emacs, hitting enter on these links will open them in the desktop browser. However, when Emacs runs on a remote machine, a hack is needed.

First off, I set Emacs to write all links to a file instead of opening them in Firefox:

(setq browse-url-generic-program "/home/torstein/bin/firefox"
      browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-generic)

Normally, this firefox points to /usr/bin/firefox or similar, but on my server, it's a just a shell script:

#! /bin/bash
echo "$@" >> $HOME/tmp/links.txt

I then use ssh to keep a local copy:

$ ssh ssh.example.com tail -f ~/tmp/links.txt > ~/tmp/links.txt

The final piece of the puzzle is this call to inotify which listens for changes to links.txt and opens the last link written in Firefox.

$ while inotifywait -e modify ~/tmp/links.txt; do firefox $(tail -1 ~/tmp/links.txt); done

Security and privacy

Disk encryption

I've set up full disk encryption including the /boot partition where the kernels reside.

Passwords

For several years now, I've had my passwords in the git backed, PGP encrypted password manager aptly named pass

Chat

My family and most of my friends are all on Signal, I believe they strike a good balance between convenience, privacy and security.

Surfing the web

After using Firefox Developer Edition for a long time, I've switched to Firefox ESR. It works well for my use and it's wonderful that it comes with the operating system, I only need to apt-get install it from the default repositories.

Browser extensions

To be a wee bit more secure and private when surfing the interweb, I use these browser plugins:

I also grown fond of these plugins:

The look

Dracula

These days, I prefer the Dracula theme and have managed to hunt down or create configuration for most of the apps I use every day to use these colours.

Licensed under CC BY Creative Commons License ~ ✉ torstein.k.johansen @ gmail ~ 🐦 @torsteinkrause ~