monovergent 🛠️

  • 6 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • I wish I found a guide like that back when I first made the move to FDE. Regardless, I was adamantly against reinstalling and painstakingly replicating my customizations, so I came up with a hacky way of tacking on FDE.

    It went something along the lines of:

    1. Shrinking the root partition as much as possible
    2. From Live CD, dd root partition to external drive
    3. Perform minimal encrypted install of Debian
    4. From Live CD, open LUKS container of the newly-installed Debian and overwrite the root partition within with my old root partition.
    5. Update fstab, crypttab, initramfs, and grub
    6. Cross my fingers and reboot


  • The text editor shortcut on my taskbar runs a sort of autosave script in ~/.drafts. I wanted my text editor to function more like the one on my phone so I can just jot down random thoughts without going through the whole ritual of naming and saving. It creates YYYYMMDD_text in ~/.drafts (or YYYYMMDD_text_1 etc. if it already exists) and launches Pluma, which I also have configured to autosave every 10 minutes.

    The other thing extends beyond Linux itself a bit. I like to joke that I have the most secure NT 4 / Windows 95 lookalike ever put together. Aside from the encrypted and hardened Debian base (/boot is also encrypted), I was in part inspired by Apple’s parts pairing (yikes!). So my coreboot is configured to only accept my boot disk. If it’s swapped out or missing, or if I want to boot something else, it will ask for a password. In the unlikely event my machine gets stolen, the thief must at a minimum reflash the BIOS or replace the motherboard to make it useful again. Idk, it amuses me every time I think about it.










  • It’s nice and easy on the eyes. I conjecture that glossy and matte (as seen here) styles of skeuomorphism gave way to more abstract design since:

    • Skeuomorphism is hard to get just right without being excessive and tacky
    • Saturated, simple blocks of color pop out more, particularly on the increasingly prevalent mobile UI
    • And thus also have better shelf appeal

    If it were up to me, the red line would be when buttons and interactive elements are indistinguishable from text. The stock Android settings is probably among the worst offenders in this regard.

    What I really miss is light mode that isn’t hated for blinding users and dark mode that doesn’t plunge the user into the void. Those “toolbars” look lovely, perfect for any lighting condition or time of day. I’ve yet to understand why, at present, designers insist on pure white everywhere when it comes to light mode. Maybe everyone is using the night light filter so it doesn’t matter? At least pure black dark mode makes sense for power efficiency on OLEDs.


    • Debian stable (w/ XFCE). No-nonsense, excellent community support, well-documented, low-maintenance, and runs on anything so I can expect things to work the same way across all of my machines, old, new(ish), or virtual
    • Just flexible enough that I can customize it to my taste but not so open-ended that I have to agonize over every last config
    • It’s been around for many years and will be around for many more
    • I often entertain the idea of moving to Alpine or even BSD, but I can’t resist the software selection available on Debian



  • Debian Stable. Predictable, low-maintenance, and well-supported. From time to time, I think about switching over to Alpine or even BSD, but the software selection and abundance of Q&A posts for Debian and its derivatives keeps me coming back. Having been a holdout on older Windows versions in the past, I’m quite used to waiting for new features and still amazed at how much easier life is with a proper package manager.


  • XFCE4. It’s intuitive and predictable without sacrificing the ability to customize it exactly the way I want (with Chicago95 ofc). The built-in panel widgets are nothing short of amazing: battery, CPU, RAM, network, and disk monitors with labels toggled off to save space and a clock with only what I need on one line: MM/DD HH:mm:ss

    Enough features so that it “just works” (no nitpicking through config files), especially on laptops, without being bloated in any way. Bonus of its lightweight nature is that I can keep my Debian/XFCE setup consistent across all of my machines, both old and new.

    Can’t wait for the finished xfwm4 port to wayland so I don’t have to sacrifice some security running X11 and so I can do fractional scaling on hidpi machines.



  • What did it in were the semi-annual mandatory feature updates, which restored the invasive settings and bloat I worked hard to remove. Already being acquainted with Linux at that point, I began dual-booting and later having Windows on an entirely separate machine for a few stubborn programs I needed for work.

    What made me acquainted with Linux was looking for alternatives after the loss of theming options and the start menu in Windows 8. That eventually brought me to my present Debian setup with the Chicago 95 theme, which recreates (and even improved) the workflow and stability I had grown to love in Windows 2000.

    The first time I ever booted into a Linux iso, however, was to migrate files off of my machine, which was excruciatingly slow to transfer files under XP.