Geek with an attitude

When Apple announced the transition to Apple's own ARM-based silicon, I was ecstatic! I've always enjoyed tinkering with ARM based single-board computers such as the raspberry pi 4 and Pinebook Pro. But they always had sub-par performance and here was Apple trying to transition their entire lineup! Even though we all knew the performance should be good based on how recent iPad Pros scored, I don't think many expected the M1 chip, Apple's first iteration, to then beat Intel's most high-end CPUs while redefining "all-day battery life"! So naturally, I found myself clicking buy on day 1, something I rarely do before doing a ton of research. I ended up ordering the base Macbook Air but bumping up the RAM to 16GB in order to better run Docker. Disappointment: Docker support not ready My machine arrived quickly, despite getting shipped directly from China as a result of my memory upgrade. The first step was to setup the environment just the way I liked ...

A little over 6 years ago, or just 2 posts below :), I wrote about how I use VIM from the command-line to invoke a GUI version of VIM, where each file would appear in a separate tab. I've stuck with that setup to this day, where VIM is still my main IDE whether working on Linux or macOS. Recently I bought a pine64 based PINEBOOK Pro  laptop which is powered by a low-cost ARM64 Single Board Computer (SBC) . This came pre-installed with Manjaro KDE edition of Linux. Though this laptop is no slouch (I find myself using it more thanks to 8hrs+ battery), I wanted to keep it lean without loading too many GTK apps. KDE, being built on Qt, I decided to try neovim-Qt, which is powered by neovim, a somewhat newer rewrite of VIM, that is pretty slick and fast. This is how I got neovim-Qt working in a similar manner to that of vim / gvim. Install packages First, install neovim-qt. On Manjaro, this would involve pacman. sudo pacman -Sy neovim-qt Next, the secret sa...

I love Linux! For those who know me, that's somewhat of an understatement. That's because, over the years, I've been known run almost every Linux distro you can think of, on devices you probably didn't think of. I actually enjoy the process of installing and configuring the system because every distro and device/platform has its quirks and unique challenges to get it working. Over the years, I've compiled a list of useful software packages that I've grown to like and can't live without. However, I didn't much enjoy manually installing the same list of packages every time. I often found myself comparing the newly installed system with the current one to figure out what needed to be installed and configured. I got tired of this few years back and so that's why I created Install Buddy! Think bootstrapping, not a configuration management Configuration management systems are great f...