Gentlemen, Ladies,

it has been some time since I've been active in a board: back in the day when dinosaurs still roamed the lands and normal people still knew what actual hardwarebuttons were.. I was still attending school and I somehow felt the need to play one of those modern browser games. So I opened up my laptop and started searching for one. After about three days of considering every available option I had finally made up my mind: the game was set in ancient Greece. So I filled out the online registration form, logged into a server and started building up my empire. After about half an hour the increased waiting times for upgrades started out to become longer and longer so I logged out and decided to take a look at the games board. There I noticed a small area in the 'Offtopic'-corner called 'Fanart'. It had - obviously - nothing to do with actual Fanart, but was part of -this times- boards culture: to have custom pictures as signature/avatar and the members running this little fanart ecosystem were the mysterious wizards of the board, providing all those puny normal users with shiny pictures to wear. I was absolutely fascinated and needless to say, I never logged back into the game. For about the next three years or so I spent way to much of my time creating utterly useless pictures using GIMP and populating this little corner of the internet. I think this was actually also the first time I somehow got into serious contact with linux.

So typing this feels a little odd, after all I'm kinda rusty when it comes to using boards. But anyways, back to topic: Who am I?

I've been using Linux for about 7 or 8 years now. I started out with one of those atom-powered netbooks and I was genuinely amazed, when I could actually do all of my work this device once I had the awful Windows Starter Edition replaced with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. By the time I got an upgrade in hardware it was already too late. Despite the fact that I was not yet (and not for a very long time after that) a poweruser, I somehow couldn't use Windows anymore. Having to download an executable from one of the (hopefully) less questionable websites, then running the installer and carefully investigating all the checkboxes in the install dialog only to get an application? To do this every single time I had to install something. This felt just horribly wrong. I'm no caveman after all! Civilized people have package managers. So I guess I was stuck with linux. I didn't regret it since and I probably never will.

I hate computers. Seriously. I just want them to work. Sadly after a few years of repeatedly lurking behind the curtain my idea of how they have to work has become somewhat explicit.. Also I absolutely love fancy graphical user interfaces. I totally dig that kind of shit. Sadly however I haven't met any yet, so most of what I do happens in boring old text interfaces. The webbrowser as well as my mailclient and a really small amount of other programs are all that is left of the GUI crap.. yet. Apart from the webbrowser in some cases I can imagine getting rid of almost all of them. Just haven't had the time to do so. Right now there's so much more interesting stuff to do than to iterate over my workflow once again.

Mhm.. I guess distros might be interesting: Not gentoo, DSL, any BSD or slackware. Apart from that I've tried a bunch.
I'm actually pretty solid, when it comes to arch, which is also exactly why I do not use it. When it comes to my computers currently I'm usually running either Korora (a flavour of fedora, the 'k' has nothing to do with KDE) and is doing a pretty damn good job of being a desktop system or whenever I have to be debianoid usually Kubuntu. Over the years I've somehow lost the interest on Distributions, Hardware isn't really a issue any more and more or less they're all doing the same thing. I use whatever I need. Also there aren't that many interesting distributions left out there. Basically there's NixOS[0] left on my list. Currently I'm for the first time faced with having to use a system as non root user, and with this I'm probably going to look into making the most of userspace at some point in the near future. Having to depend on other people, when it comes to a workstation is just utterly awful. A package manager for my userspace would be a nice thing for example. Compiling things by hand all the time that's just not very pleasant. A project to make the userspace your distribution is probably exactly what I'm looking for. This would also make switching machines so much easier. After all those podcasts (of which I as of yet haven't heard a single one, but I will..) on similiar topics this might be a nice project to start around here, don't you think? Fuck distros, when there is userspace! Why not just claim it in a proper way?^^

Coming to userspace some of you might want to know what it is that I'm currently using as Desktop.. well.. I do like Gnome. Well I did, up until the time, when some morons decided to make it modern and it became a horrible abomination. Before that it was quite decent. I don't like xface, it's just not gnomish enough. KDE is weird. Plasma 5 is really beautiful! I guess however I never really understood what 'activities' were and thus don't understand the concept behind KDE. I do like tiling, but I hate it when all those minimal WMs don't do stuff out of the box. So for the past years I've done what for some strange reason nobody else seems to do: I've run i3 within KDE/Plasma5[1] and I've been really happy about it. I can have my tiling and my hotkeys but things like display management or default applications still work out of the box and I just don't have to bother too much.

Apart from userspace I've had a small but fair share of experience when it comes to running servers. I'm by far not an expert on this matter, but I think I at least know of some of the problematics and have a slight idea of what to do, when running a server. Also I've met several people which earn a living in doing so and are just horribly incompetent, so I guess I could humbly qualify as sysadmin. Over the past years I've taken particular interest in container technologies and networking.

Oh, I almost forgot.. as for the earnest matter of text editing: I use vim, emacs and occasionally sed.

I don't have a blog, though I've played around with the idea of posting some of my notes/thoughts online from time to time. I do have a account on github, however I haven't done that much with it as of yet. I'm not quite sure whether people would bother reading it however.

Huh, this one somehow became a slightly longer text than I expected it to in the first place. Anyways, I sincerely hope you enjoyed it..
At this point I guess it's your turn..

- g3nius mobster

[0]: There's a really intriguing thesis on package management. I haven't read much of it yet, but it might be worth a look to some of you: https://github.com/qknight/Multi-Platfor...Management
[1]: The awesomewm-wiki has a decent page on this topic.