Man I used to do SketchUp all the time in middle/high school, so nostalgic.

I’m not a thinkpad guy, but I thought one reason for people liking old thinkpads is that the old ones came with cpu’s that predate the intel management engine.

As a “sicko” (lol) I must say I don’t really futz around much if at all anymore. There are some differences but all in all I don’t think the Artix experience is much different from the regular Arch one.

Interesting, I never heard of setting your shell in the emulator config. I just used ‘chsh’ once when I setup the install.

Vim uses these commands like di" (delete everything inside “”) instead of chords (holding multiple keys down at once). Both work fine. The reason vim does this is that many regard it as more ergonomic. You don’t stretch your hand/fingers out and you can keep your fingers at homerow. You might have heard about people getting an “Emacs Pinky”. It’s basically down to preference. I don’t use emacs but I know people use vim bindings in emacs (emacs is very scriptable after all). That way you can try or integrate vim like bindings without leaving your comfy emacs.

I use fish abbreviations. Unlike bash/zsh aliases, they expand when you press space or enter. This way you see the original command every time you use the alias, and you can edit as well. This should lighten the concern you have a bit. Your concern is something that sysadmins keep in mind e.g. default vim bindings so you are always comfortable on any server. However for desktop use I don’t think leaving the speed and comfort on table is worth it. Most desktop users only use their own systems anyway.

• set a good tty font (it’s almost all you’re gonna see)
• be comfy with basic core utils (mv, cp, chmod, …)
• choose a shell (bash, fish, …) and set up some useful aliases/abbreviations
• fzf or something similar does wonders (also replaces things like dmenu)
• terminal multiplexers are used instead of window managers
• some applications allow you to do some graphics (like mpv to play video)
• there is more advanced stuff you can do with frame buffers
• there are terminal browsers like w3m or lynx
• a good extensible text editor is essential (vim, nvim, emacs, helix, …)
• research some cli applications for your usecase (cal (calendar), neomutt (email), …)

Over time your collection of aliases and scripts will grow to make common tasks you do easier.

Are universities automatically “elitist brain-rot” when they participate in rankings? When it comes to privilege, yes, rich kids that don’t deserve it are accepted into ivy league universities because of the connections they have. This is not a good thing obviously. Most researchers receive the privilege of working there because of their good research done at other universities. That is why they stay on top: a lot of excellent researchers want to join those universities. Obviously MIT has a very good standing when it comes to CS. The dick-measuring contest is but a small part of the university ecosystem. Also, neo-caste system is a quite strong. Most ivy league researchers are probably not rich or powerful. For that you have to look at our “friends” in the C-suite. I understand the sentiment, but I find “hate”, “elitist brain-rot” and “neo-caste system” way too strong.

It kinda sounds like some kind of driver issue to me. The fact that it doesn’t detect modes other than a single super basic one sound like not having a proper graphics driver. However, I have no clue why it would work again on reboot and maybe even more importantly, why the other monitor does have a proper mode detected. I wouldn’t expect that if the driver was messed (you would expect all monitors to be assigned some basic mode).

As I understand you take in some stream video akin to /dev/video0 and want to enlarge it so you can look at your monitor while playing? Whenever it is something with video ffmpeg can probably solve it. FFmpeg flags like -vf also work on the video player, ffplay.

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Scaling

At the bottom they talk about choosing scaling algorithms, try some out to see what combination of quality and speed you get.

If google had a baby she would drop it on its head.

It is shown by non-systemd distros that systemd doesn’t really solve problems for desktop usage. When you switch away, not much changes basically. I sometimes hear that it is a different story on servers.

What about FZF? For example, I want to play a video file without digging through my files, I type fflpay and press ctrl-t which opens a fzf fuzzy finder. Type the incomplete name and select it. I would suggest this at least for the second example as running the wrong executable may get you in trouble. This is on the fish shell but I think other shells have similar possibilities. I also use this ctrl-t thing in combination with nvim or even cd.

You can call it low effort, but Lemmy is a “link aggregator”. Even just sharing links has its value.

I ditched ZSH a long time ago because it wasn’t snappy. From what I remember, things like autocomplete, syntax highlighting, etc were written in ZSH and not build in. In something like Fish it is build in and it felt much faster to me.