>/. the machine
My daily driver is an old potato that most people would have thrown away years ago. Cost me £45 second hand (funds are scarce these days! lol) — I only added 2 memory sticks and an SSD that I had laying around from a previous rig. And this thing purrs like a kitten! Beautiful! Prrrrr! It does its job. I like it. It keeps me honest about performance and resource usage. This whole website and all my coding projects are being written on it!
cpu: Intel Core i5 750 @ 2.67GHz (2009)
gpu: NVIDIA GeForce GT 710
ram: 12GB
storage: ext4 on SSD
>/. the software
os: Alpine Linux v3.23 x86_64
kernel: Linux 6.18.13-0-lts
window manager: Sway (Wayland)
terminal: Foot
shell: Bash
editor: Helix
launcher: wofi
files: yazi
browser: Firefox
pdf reader: zathura
theme: Dracula — everywhere
font: JetBrains Mono Nerd Font
>/. why alpine
I came from Arch Linux. Before that, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu. I was having some performance issues running Arch on this setup — no fault of Arch itself, it actually runs great on old hardware. But I needed a change, and Arch was getting in the way. Skill issues? Maybe... Either way, that's when I discovered Alpine Linux. Alpine is different — it uses musl libc instead of glibc, OpenRC instead of systemd, and strips everything to the absolute minimum. On old hardware like mine, that matters.
It took some patience to get a full desktop running on it. Alpine's focus is containers and servers, not desktops. But once it clicked, it became the best Linux experience I've had. Fast, clean, honest. I love it!
>/. why helix
Helix is a terminal text editor inspired by Vim and Kakoune but with a fresh approach. It has LSP support built in, a great default config, and doesn't require a plugin ecosystem to be useful. I configured it with language servers for Go, Rust, Python, Bash, C, Lua, CSS and HTML. Helix was super easy to set up — I had my config running in probably less than an hour. It didn't get in my way, and even if the documentation isn't the most beginner-friendly, I understood it well enough to get everything running quickly with all the language support I needed. Simple to use, lightweight, and a great experience so far.
>/. dotfiles
All my configuration files are backed up on Codeberg. If you want to use any of them as a starting point, feel free (coming soon — will be public shortly).