I had some problems with Debian, mainly owing to me doing too minimal an initial install. So I backed out and came at it with Fedora, and that worked a little better. But I realized pretty quickly that my writing process is not “sit down to a completely clear writing surface and begin to type.”

When I write I am probably in a few browser tabs, looking up references, checking assumptions, etc. A lot of “ADHD-friendly” approaches assume that the primary attentional issue is one of distractibility. But writing is something of a refuge for me because it’s somewhere I can safely hyper focus: Even if I have ten tabs open as I write, those ten tabs are in service of writing something I am very, very focused on. I don’t find myself drifting around between distracting websites or doomscrolling. I am writing, which is something much more than just typing out words: It’s thinking, learning, examining, introspecting.

That reframed the question of “what is a writerdeck” for me.

The other issue with the “just go live in a tty” matter is that the typography isn’t great on the best day.

But I still like the idea of a machine you can’t do quite as much with. Something that, when you pick it up, is really only meant for one thing, and that is configured to direct you into that thing.

So rather than starting in a tmux session in a tty, I decided to allow X.org into the picture, but using i3 as the starting point.

I don’t really want a tiling wm, exactly. Something I learned from dialing in my tmux config is that I like to have one app on the screen at a time. i3 makes that possible.

My i3 config just opens me up into a fullscreen local ghostty on one workspace, a fullscreen ghostty ssh’d into my mini on the next, and a fullscreen browser with my custom startpage on the third. I can get to each with mod-1 through mod-3 and never really see the underlying wm or desktop, because I don’t really need or want to.

If I want a quick peek at battery status, date, time, etc. I can mod-f to let the i3 status bar peek through.

The donor machine, btw, is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (7th Gen). It’s got a Core i5 10th-gen CPU with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. You can get one at this spec or a gen later for under $300 if you look around. The hardware is very well understood by any modern Linux. The display is gorgeous.

I’m still tweaking the config a little bit. Once it feels a little more gelled I’ll put it in a gist.

Nothing like a four-hour-long strategy summit to tend to a quick bakeoff between Pop!_OS and Fedora. As Ed noted last night after reading yesterday’s post, you can always tell Fedora to load GNOME as an Xorg session instead of a Wayland one. What did that get me?

• Working taskbar widgets
• Decent performance from my Elgato CamLink 4K
• Decent screensharing in Zoom
• Mostly normalish typography? Less wild variation anyhow.
• Fedora’s software store app is faster and less glitchy than the one Pop!_OS offers.
• Fedora’s software is a little more up to date.

Is it snappier? I dunno.

Mainly what I know is that I won’t be fragmenting my muscle memory across three OSes.

What I also know is that Xorg is living on borrowed time in Fedora-land.

AirPlay 2 with shairport-sync

I mentioned shairport-sync as a way to stream to a Linux machine. From the command line, you just run it and tell it which backend to direct sound to. It advertises your machine with Avahi, you stream to the machine, sound comes out.

As a systemd service it is fussier because there are permissions issues getting at Alsa and or Pipewire. I could see the endpoint in the AirPlay list, but nothing was coming out and there were a bunch of errors when I checked status. I tried a few obviously bad ideas then Googled in earnest.

Putting this in ~/.config/systemd/user/shairport-sync.service then enabling and starting it with systemctl --user did the thing:

[Unit]
Description=Shairport Sync - AirPlay Audio Receiver
After=pipewire-pulse.service
Wants=network-online.target
After=network.target network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
StandardOutput=journal
ExecStart=/usr/bin/shairport-sync -o alsa

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

So the Linux box is hooked up to the office bookshelf speakers, I can play music on it directly, or I can stream to it from the Mac or my phone without manually stopping and starting shairport-sync from the command line.

Fixing Flatpak Zoom fonts

Zoom from a Flatpak looks particularly bonkers under GNOME: The fonts are tiny to the point of unreadability. Evidently they used QT to build it, etc. etc. There are a bunch of incantations all over the place that involve jacking with config files. There is also simply doing an override of the QT scale factor:

sudo flatpak override --env=QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1.5 us.zoom.Zoom

Adjust to taste.

LocalSend is pretty much cross-platform AirDrop

If your machines are on the same network, LocalSend works across Mac, iOS/iPadOS, and Linux to provide an AirDrop-style text, file, and image transfer service. Looks like it also supports Windows and Android.

I have it set to minimize to taskbar on the Mac and Linux machines. Just sits there and does its thing.