>>turrin+(OP)
common theme: tiled layout, terminals, minimum fancy decorations.

>>turrin+(OP)
RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.

>>turrin+(OP)
I echo this. My desktop has stayed virtually unchanged for decades, and in retrospect, it explains why I use the Sway tiling window manager today.

>>gentoo+Nb
He’s…something.

>>gentoo+Nb
The Trisquel website has some screenshots. The 7.0 LTS is from 2014 so it's likely he was probably running something like this: https://trisquel.info/en/7.0-screenshots

>>turrin+(OP)
Linus Torvalds currently uses Fedora with GNOME, which was fun to learn because that's also been my personal choice for a while now.

(source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA )

>>turrin+(OP)
I completely misread '2015' as '2025' and thought these were from this November rather than November 10 years ago. I couldn't believe so many people were still using what appeared to be Aqua-era OS X.

>>gentoo+Nb
On the contrary, I think that was a wonderful answer and reflects the POV well. Hard to imagine something more Stallman-esque!

>>jasone+rc
What are you echoing?

>>Retr0i+ld
Yeah mine too (but using Silverblue).

After spending years with Arch/NixOS/Ubuntu/Sway Im quite happy with Fedora+GNOME now. It just works.

>>Retr0i+ld
It's been well known for awhile now that it's his preferred setup.

He seems to want as much stability as possible; while being as minimal as possible; with as little fuss to install and keep up to date as possible. Fedora meets those needs. Gnome is Fedora's main concentration.

>>Zambyt+we
Mostly tiling WMs and terminals

>>gentoo+Nb
"I don't know how to make a screenshot" - what a fucking star.

>>ekjhgk+Pe
This is the guy who is 'browsing' web using wget+email afterall:

> For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

>>quantu+Ce
He explained that in the linked video - Fedora makes it easy for him to test custom kernel builds.

>>vzaliv+xb
I think I see only one truly tiled layout. But yes, "terminals and editors" as the core developer workflow is extremely conserved over time. It dates from the mid 80's on Sun 2's and really hasn't changed much in four decades.

It's probably not worth arguing whether this is the "best" when compared with vscode+LSP+Claude or whatever happens to be en vogue in the moment.

But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal. Those of us in the cult aren't observed to leave the compound except in extremely rare circumstances. I'll be doing the same stuff on my death bed, likely.

>>ekjhgk+Pe
Ye I need more pure hearted dogmatism in my life such that I can say that and don't lie. Have some secretary send me webpages with obfuscated JS by fax when I need to sin.

>>turrin+(OP)
Old macOS has got so much soul. I missed all those years since I started working with it back when Sierra was around, clearly not the same.

>>Retr0i+ld
He said also because fedora seemed the most amenable to running custom kernels which is basically what he does all day.

>>turrin+(OP)
Previous discussion: >>10722536

>>quantu+Ce
Oh I didn't know Gnome was the official flavour now, last time I paid attention it was still KDE

>>vzaliv+xb
And that hasn't changed much since. At work and at home, I'm usually looking at emacs with no tab or menu bar, full screen on all monitors, with everything else (browser, etc) a virtual desktop switch away: exwm at home, one terminal emacsclient in ssh per monitor with a single daemon on linux server (accessed from Windows) at work. With many minor variations this is how my desktop has looked since my first programming job, which coincidentally was in 2002, but the details of the setup have changed a lot. The bit that has remained constant is that all I want on my monitor(s) when I'm programming is code.

Edit: Probably the most visible change is better fonts and font rendering.

Edit 2: To expand on "all I want is code": let's say there is a menu bar with maybe 10 menus and 100 or so items, and a project navigator thingy, and a compiler output window. I would much rather these things not take up permanent space on my screen. Every one of them shows information/commands that I can access with a key combination and in some cases some fuzzy completion after hitting a key combination. Any decent editor can do this and you can learn it in an afternoon, and if you're going to spend the next couple of decades in front of it it's worth getting rid of the pixels permanently allocated to advertising "you can do this thing".

>>turrin+(OP)
RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.

>>jsk260+if
This makes sense if you want to reject the modern web, but using lynx or w3m would work as well. But if you generally want to champion free software and put the "personal" in PC, then I think you necessarily need to familiarize yourself with modern computing or else you can't really have a good opinion on it.

For instance, if you refuse to play around with LLMs out of some dogmatic reason that they're not "truly" open (note: I don't know what his true opinions are), then you risk completely missing the boat and can't meaningfully shape the space of modern discourse.

>>pelagi+Yf
If you want a macOS/OS X release with soul, check out Snow Leopard.

>>kracke+Yh
No, you don't know what the reasons are. You're assuming he just wants to avoid graphical interfaces. That might not be the reason. In fact, I suspect that it has to do privacy, where lynx won't help you.

>>Almond+2h
See also: Knuth. Literally wrote the book on algorithms, but barely is able to do more than open a window in FVWM.

>>ekjhgk+ei
What is the privacy leak vector using lynx? It does not use JS, so I'm not sure how running wget on another server is better than lynx over ssh or mosh?

>>turrin+(OP)
Hey this one over here [1] has a virtual desktop minimap on the top right. That person mentions fvwm which has this [2] website with screenshots, but I don't see the minimap there. Could someone help me find a reference to it?

Update: Also on the bottom left here [3]

[1] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_warren_toomey.gif

[2] https://www.fvwm.org/

[3] https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_jordan_hubbard.jpg

>>Retr0i+Vg
It's been a long, long time. I think Red Hat 8/9 (from 2002-2003) had a default KDE build. Even in Fedora Core 1 Gnome was default.

Now, there's a separate build to download for KDE. It's likely because Gnome is default install for Red Hat Enterprise Workstation.

>>kracke+Yi
I don't know, we're both speculating. I'm just advising against "oh he could just as well do X" - you don't know.

>>Almond+2h
I don't know why people take him so seriously. He said some decent things about software freedom, and the rest of his entire existence seems to be him being deliberately obtuse and generally off-putting. I find it bizarre that there's this strange carve-out here for him, especially considering that he would absolutely loathe 99% of the software that gets discussed here.

>>ekjhgk+9j
The one in the FVWM screenshot is FvwmPager. It comes with FVWM.

>>turrin+(OP)
Haha love that jerkcity is featured in Jordan's screenshot!

>>ventur+qj
> He said some decent things about software freedom

Well, he also created GCC and GNU Emacs.

Linux and the idea that developer tools should be free wouldn't exist without him.

>>arexxb+Jj
So I can't just use it by itself. E.g. I use i3wm, would those work together? Sorry if it's a stupid question.