joseph zhong

Building a small PC [3/N]

Now that the PC is finally built it’s time to install OS and software!

  1. The first thing to do is check that the thing actually even turns on. Check! First try! Was pretty escstatic about this one.
  2. Second step, do you get video?
    • The meshlicious forces the GPU ports to point downwards into the ground, so their included 90-deg HDMI was actually clutch.
    • At first I was lazy and plugged into the motherboard HDMIs and that completely didn’t work. No video. Only after plugging into GPU did it boot to the BIOS
  3. The first thing I did was to explicitly set the memory to the max 3600mHz (why else did I splurge on the 64GB memory!?) After that I tested the fan noise; at “performance” ~1500rpm CPU fans became audible but less annoying than my stupid gamer mouse clicks. Full-tilt ~3000 RPM was ridiculous, hope I never reach that otherwise I’m replacing the stock cooler.

Booting!

  1. Use Etcher to create a boot drive from USB
  2. Ubuntu failed half way so after bumbling around for some time I then restarted without internet access to begin with.
  3. Setting up MacOS keys was actually insanely difficult for some reason. I ended up doing more soul searching and found the best solution yet: Kinto. Commands in app-specific things like Terminal commands, Chrome-tab switching, etc work great!
  4. I ended up installing a separate app-launcher/searcher-like Spotlight in MacOS (uLauncher) since I at least could open it with ‘shift + space’ since CMD is eaten by default.
  5. It took me a really long time to set up window-stacking management! Stupid elitist linux devs/users make things so hard sometimes. I ended up using Awesome after testing a bunch (that just failed to init from the beginning).

For a really long time I was desparately looking for the best MacOS look-alike. ElementaryOS looks the best and I tried it for a little bit. It’s really close, although I didn’t want to spend time dealing with stupid defaults again and now I’m sticking with Ubuntu 22 for the time being.

[05-18-2022] UPDATE:

I ended up spending a TON of time customizing the Awesome-Tiles, native ubuntu keyboard shortcuts, shortcuts in Kinto… I feel like this will require on-going attention…

Essentially:

  1. In the Native Ubuntu, disable anything that conflicted with the Awesome-Tiles and any other custom config (e.g. disabled CTRL-Space for Applications Menu, and any window and workspace movement)
  2. Let uLauncher and Awesome-Tiles override things: CTRL-Space for “spotlight”, and cmd/super-ctrl-arrows for tiling.
  3. Kinto has a bunch of app-specific behaviors; had to fix some of the Chrome browser stuff to properly “nav back/next”, and switch tabs. There’s some funky stuff happening to Terminal that eats the Super-CTRL-Arrows, but at least I set it up that Alt-CMD-Arrow gives left/right/up/down, sadly I haven’t figured out corner tiling yet. This so far only affects Terminal; we’ll see about PyCharm (just tested, so far seems good…)

I also didn’t know how to enable an accessibility scroll-zoom like MacOS nicely does; so I just did a CTRL-SUPER-Z to Zoom In/Out, seems not too bad, but not quite as nice as MacOS.

One more extension I just added: I realized I kept looking to the top-right for the time and noticed it was never there: finally moved this with https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1287/unite/

Unintuitive that I had to download open-source extension to do somethin so simple; but I guess I just totally took it for-granted that this is actually not easily configurable in MacOS / Windows; the top center was just completely not what I’m used to and has bothered me for a very long time ever since I’ve used Linux (although I recall old Ubuntu had date/time in the top-right? Been a long time since using Ubuntu 14)…