[toxik]

i3 aside, the continuation to your story for me is, use Linux machine, be decently productive but nothing works quite the way it should.

Change your keyboard layout to one of your own? Eh maybe Xmodmaps, oh but then it gets reset every so often because $HISTORICAL_ARTIFACT. You have to change the actual xkb mapping, which is very much not a “happy path” in any DE.

The only graphical e-mail client that actually seems feature complete is Thunderbird, and for _years_ I have to race to disable the global search within 10 seconds of starting it. Otherwise the program just freezes up. I don’t even know what to use for calendar stuff.

I would really love it if Linux was viable for me as a desktop OS. It just isn’t, because of things like these.

[cycomanic]

Not sure what you're trying to do in keyboard layouts. I've yet to encounter the flexibility for keyboard layouts that you have in linux in any other OS.

Regarding email clients, again I'm not sure what you consider feature complete, but even some of the proprietary options like mailspring or hiri exist on linux.

For calendar it again depends on what you are trying to do. I've recently started using Minetime, which is not OSS but free and is working very well for me.

One of the weird phenomena that I find in these discussions, is that people are often happy for proprietary software (like OSX or windows) to restrict what they are able to do, and having to adjust their workflow to these systems, but when it comes to OSS suddenly not being able to match the previous workflow, makes the system unsuitable. (Note that this is not aimed at you directly, just a general observation).

[hxegon]

Current apple user/ex linux user

Can't speak to your firebird issues, never used it, but as for keyboard issues?

Spouse uses my main machine for basic stuff, she has her own account. I use dvorak, she uses qwerty. About 75% of the time when the layout is switched back from qwerty to dvorak it becomes completly fubar, and all layouts output non-sense garbage until a restart. Because the layouts are broken, I can't save any of my terminal work.

I'm still pretty on the fence about things, but honestly I'd say linux and os-x are pretty even as far as shit breaking, and imo linux is a little bit better. I remember the old days when you sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade & pray, but stuff is pretty stable even on distros like arch these days.

Every time there's a major update for os x, I already know it will definitely break something for me. Catalina broke most my game collection that could run on os x to begin with, and I'll be waiting at least another couple months before upgrading to big sur.

This isn't to try and invalidate your experience, but just saying that mine has been: Switched to OS X because things were more stable and I need a solid work machine, but linux is getting more stable while my faith in apple's software quality goes down dramatically every year.

[nemo136]

For the keyboard layout, use a mechanical keyboard program it through qmk, loose 1 month adapting to it, and voila, problem solved.

[Ar-Curunir]

Lol this is sarcasm, right?

[Koshkin]

No, just a typo.

[098799]

Changing the xkb mapping is not a happy path? It's perfectly portable to any system running X11, you can define your own shortcuts to quickly switch maps with setxkbmap... It's a backbone of my workflow with a 60% keyboard.

[bee_rider]

I haven't had that experience. I have had the slightly annoying experience of mapping keys using tools for X, and then realizing some time later that when in the console those mappings vanish. Of course, there are tools for remapping keys in the console, but they are a little less user friendly.

In the end, I got a keyboard that incidentally had functionality to remap keys built in (I wanted the keyboard already anyway, but the remapping feature was a nice bonus). This ended up routing around the problem entirely, and seems like a generally better solution. Now my remaps survive all the way to Windows, for my rare trips over there.

[zhengyi13]

Your complaint about the xkb/xmodmap/whatever situation is dead on, so my solution has been to simply go with a programmable keyboard. Don't have to remap capslock -> ctrl anymore - no matter what distro I use, capslock is always ctrl, right from the get-go.

[donatzsky]

What's wrong with Thunderbird's built-in calendar?

[vmchale]

The mail client is worse than Windows IMO. But a tiling window manager and terminal is worth it for now.