pfm:
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about
My favourite work environment
My operating system of choice is FreeBSD. I’ve
given it a try many years ago and enjoyed it a lot ever since. Compared to
other operating systems I’ve used, it is quite stable, clean and easy to
administer once you get the basics. It is also easy to adjust it to one’s
needs, which is very important for me.
FreeBSD features
Several features I like about FreeBSD are:
- Base system is clean, simple and designed very well. Configuring most of
the services boils down to putting correct definitions in the
/etc/rc.conf
file.
- Ports and binary packages, two sources of software adapted to work on my
system.
- Jails, which make it possible to compartmentalise software. This is nice
from security perspective, but also from overall system maintainability
perspective. For instance, I’ve installed NextCloud in a jail to limit the
impact on the rest of the system (and to be able to throw it away when I’m
done, without having to track any packets installed as dependencies.
- ZFS, an advanced, self-healing filesystem and volume manager.
Some features that FreeBSD shares with other operating systems:
- Powerful command languages (shells) and command-line tools, including
ability to chain those tools to form data-processing pipelines.
- Everything-is-a-file philosophy, making it possible to treat a WebDAV
resource as a local filesystem.
- Developer friendly — there are numerous programming tools available under
POSIX-compliant operating-systems.
All this power is available without running any graphical environment. This
means I can easily get rid of any distractions, switch to a plain old terminal
and focus on what I want or have to do.
Most of the time, I use:
- Either vi or GNU Emacs — two powerful text editors. I don’t use vim
because I’m fine with my system’s default text editor. When I need powerful
add-ons, I switch to GNU Emacs.
- Lynx, Firefox or Netsurf, in that order — to browse the web. Lynx is just
enough most of the time, one just has to learn to read pages that were
designed by web-developers of JavaScript-era.
- Mutt and MBSync — two mail programs: one to read and write email, the
other to retrieve it from the server.
- Amfora — a Gemini client. It’s
similar in spirit to Lynx.
- IntelliJ IDEA — the best Java integrated development environment I’ve ever
tried. JetBrains obviously hire some of the best, because this software isd
esigned so well, so stable and full of convenient features…
This work by Piotr Mieszkowski is
licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0