de-Microsofting
Like a lot of other folks, I've been slowly disentangling my computing life from Microsoft over the past year. I didn't have a lot to do here -- I don't think I've daily driven Windows since Windows 2000, for one thing -- but it's enough that I thought I'd write up a list.
Operating systems
I've replaced Windows on my gaming laptop with Bazzite. There are some issues now and then but largely it Just Works, which is what I want for PC games. I've been using KDE Plasma and at times it's almost indistinguishable from the previous Windows setup. Especially when I've got Final Fantasy XIV going fullscreen, which, let's be real, is my primary use case for that system.
Editors
- vim or some variation on it has always been one of my editors of choice, but in recent years I found myself using VSCode more and more for certain programming tasks. I've now stopped using VSCode and gone back to using vim exclusively, or rather neovim. I've taken it as an excuse to clean up my configuration and get a more up-to-date setup when it comes to plugins and LSPs, and it's really nice now.
- I use a combination of neovide on the desktop and plain neovim in a tmux session over ssh.
- Updating my neovim configuration to get a more VSCode-like experience was incredibly daunting to set up, so I don't recommend this for most folks. If I weren't using vim, I'd probably go back to Sublime Text, which is what I used before VSCode.
- For previewing markdown, I've gone back to using Marked. It's a great app and a good way to support an independent developer.
- There is apparently a Marked 3 in the works, but I've only used Marked 1 and 2. Marked 1 and 2 were standalone purchases; Marked 3 looks like it might be a subscription. But you can still buy Marked 2 at the time of writing, and it works for my needs.