Almost a year ago, I returned to the Linux Desktop after almost 20 years. I abandoned it a month or so later out of frustration with a surprising lack of configurability and general exhaustion of addressing the myriad papercuts that come with trying to change computing platforms.

In the last few weeks, I’ve revisited it and had a lot more success.

The Core Problems

The main problems that kept me from adopting Linux day to day were:

• Inability to set keyboard shortcuts for apps to provide a Mac-like experience (namely, using Meta or Alt instead of Ctrl so I could have the same common shortcuts everywhere).
• Clipboard Managers didn’t seem to really work.
• Lack of a Dash-like API lookup tool.

There were some papercuts, too. These were the most painful:

• Inability to configure the Framework 13’s trackpad scrolling speed.
• Global text replacement/text expansion doesn’t work
• PWA support with Firefox
• 1Password reliability and compatibility with Firefox

I’ve found solutions for some of these and set expectations about others, and have a decent working setup. It’s not perfect, but it’s usable.

xremap Solves Keyboard Shortcuts

xremap seems to inject itself at the right layer of the OS to allow remapping keyboard shortcuts. The best example of what was throwing me off was Firefox’s use of Ctrl as the modifier (and zero ability to change this setting). My fingers are used to using the Cmd key on mac, and used to consistent shortcuts across apps (for example, Ctrl-C isn’t “copy” in terminal apps, since that sends a control sequence).

xremap solves this, once I figured out the magic strings required to make it work and found a way to run it on login. At a high level, you create a YAML file like so:

- name: Firefox
  application:
    only: "firefox"
  remap:
    Alt-q: C-q
    Alt-c: C-c
    Alt-v: C-v
    Alt-t: C-t

Figuring out Magic Strings is Hard

The string given to only: is surprisingly hard to figure out. Even now, the only way I know to figure it out is to run xremap with debugging and observe the log with what it outputs when you interact with a window (I’m running Wayland-only, and most of the internet searches for debugging this problem only work with X11).

But, the remap: section is where you set things up: when I type Alt-c, it sends Ctrl-c. You can set this up for any app and it seems to work pretty consistently (in fact, this is probably the most consistent behavior of any piece of software on the Linux desktop). You can even have it match wildcards, so here is how I apply all these settings to all Firefox PWAs:

- name: FirefoxPWA
  application:
    only: /^FFPWA/
  remap:
    Alt-q: C-q
    Alt-c: C-c
    Alt-v: C-v
    Alt-t: C-t

At this point, the main annoyance is having to set up a mapping for new apps I install or use. But basically, if you are logging xremap’s output, you can click on an app, try to use a keyboard shortcut, and it will usually output that app’s name, which you can then use in this file.

For example, the file browser’s name is org.gnome.Nautilus, which I would never figured out in a million years.

Getting Things to Run at Login is Hard

It also helps to run xremap with --watch so it will pick up changes without having to be manually restarted.

I will say that getting this to run on login was amazingly difficult to do. I have no idea if what I came up with is the best way to do it, but it was the last of many attempts to get it working. I had to make a wrapper script and much with /etc/udev/rules.d/input.rules.

Here is the script for setting it up that I used. Oof.

Clipboard Management Doesn’t Really Work

I tried a lot of clipboard managers, and ended up using GPaste. I wouldn’t say it works, but it seems to provide the easiest way to access previously-copied snippets.

How Clipboard Management should work: Focus a text field in any app (including vim), invoke a keyboard shortcut to show a menu of available snippets on the clipoboard, select one, it is inserted into the text field. This is how all clipboard management works on the Mac.

How Clipboard Mac works on Linux: Focus a text field in any app, but you can’t have a global keyboard shortcut for whatever reason, so using the mouse invoke the app and using the mouse select the snippet to paste, then use the mouse to focus the text field again, then paste. This sucks, but is workable.

From what I can tell, global keyboard shortcuts are difficult or impossible to configure. It also seems like there is not a universal text input system in Linux, so the idea that an app can appear, be interacted with, go away, and leave you back at the text input you started with is not possible to do consistently.

I tried a lot of clipboard managers and a lot of different ways to invoke them. None of them truly worked, so I’ve settled for the workflow above. It’s not great, but it works and is less friction than I would’ve thought.

Lack of API Lookup App

To see the workflow for API lookups on the Mac, check out my original post. It’s awesome to go from either Alfred (launcher) or vim to looking at API docs.

This just doesn’t seem possible on Linux. I tried two solutions:

• Zeal is an attempt to build Dash for Linux, but a) it is missing almost all documentation I would want, like various RubyGems, and b) there is no way to programmatically invoke a search such that it performs the search and focuses/activates the window. This means you have to use the mouse to interact with it.
• DevDocs is a website that can be installed as a PWA. You can programmatically perform a search and have it focus/activate by properly and carefully configuring the PWA setup in Firefox. Unfortunately, a) DevDocs has almost none of the documentation I want to look up (RubyGems), b) it’s extremely flaky, often showing no results or just hanging, and c) it remembers the scroll position when loading new pages, meaning each new search requires grabbing the mouse and scrolling back up to the top of the page. Linux requires a lot of mousing.

For now I’m using DevDocs and back to web searches for everything else. This really does suck, but I think I could live with it.

Do Not Use Snap or, through inaction, allow Snap to be used.

I was banging my head against a wall for hours because I had installed Firefox and 1Password via Snap as that is what the OS was telling me to do. In this setup, Firefox and 1Password do not work together. 1Password barely works at all, and Firefox PWAs do not work, period.

Unwinding this was not easy, despite using snap to uninstall them. I had to first install these tools via apt, which was a huge amount of code and setup. Then I was seeing snap just re-install these apps anyway. So I had to do further munging in some configuration to try to prevent that. I’m not sure if I have succeeded, but once I stopped using Snap, applications started working.

And, given how often Linux requires rebooting and logout/login, it seems to have stuck to the Firefox/1Password versions I installed.

Update While Writing This Post: Snap re-installed Firefox, even though I had set the priority for it to not do that! What a great fucking system!

I’m not sure what the point of Snap is, but my official policy is I hate it.

PWAs Sorta Work!

Progressive Web Apps AKA PWAs AKA running websites as if they were native apps are a really cool concept. They really would be a sweet solution if they were properly supported by browsers and operating systems. Chrome/Chromium/Edge appear to offer good support, but in practice, their PWAs don’t work - they are just windows of Chromium and not their own apps. I think the reason has to do with something something Gnome something Wayland, but I have no idea. I tried a lot of configurations and Chrome-derived browsers. None worked property.

Ultimately, I was able to use the Progressive Web Apps for Firefox extension, which provides the best support I could find. The main issue with it is that it doesn’t really respect or support a lot of metadata and behavior for PWAs, so you have to muck in about:config to get things working well.

I was able to script this almost entirely, so the process of installing a PWA is as painless as I could make it. But it still sucks.

The reason PWAs matter is that most services don’t make apps for Linux, but with a modicum of server-side configuration, and support from a browser/OS, a website can be made to act like an app.

I also created pwa.support to try to document how PWAs work across browsers and operating systems, plus details on how to use the PWA for Firefox extension effectively.

Things I have Yet To Solve

The Trackpad Sucks

The trackpad on the Framework 13 is absolute garbage for a lot of reasons, and two things make it hard to use that I couldn’t fix:

• Clicking moves the mouse cursor so you get a lot of clicks in the wrong place. Macs must have some way to counter this. The trackpad seems designed for a Windows world where you only ever click on the lower left part of the trackpad. Macs haven’t worked like that for over a decade and I cannot believe PC trackpads are still the same as they were 10 or even 20 years ago.
• Scrolling is hard-coded to the speed of light and not configurable that I could tell. I think it has something to do with Wayland, but it’s just mind-boggling. The scroll speed of my mouse is also not configurable, but it seems set at something usable.

While I prefer a trackpad, and my Magic Trackpad does work, the scroll speed makes them both unusable, so I try to use the mouse whenever I can’t use the keyboard. Desktop Linux requires a ton of mousing, but it’s generally fine.

Fingerprint Doesn’t Really Work

Using the Framework’s fingerprint to login pretty much doesn’t work. About 50% of the time, I open my laptop to a message that it’s timed out. The remainder of the time, if I don’t succeed on my first attempt it won’t try again. I set the PAM configuration to try more than once, but it just won’t.

For sudo and 1Password unlocking it works more reliably, but also does not try more than once. I did try to set up multiple fingerprints, but the UX is so bad. It took me 10 minutes of tapping my finger to get the first one set up. The UI provides no real feedback about what’s happening or what to do.

Text Expansion Not Really Possible

I don’t use a lot of text expansions, but I do have a few. I set up espanso and in some text fields in some apps when Mercury is in retrograde, it works. All other times it doesn’t. I think this is related to why clipboard management doesn’t work: there is no way to make a truly global keyboard shortcut and no API to interact with all text entry mechanisms in the OS. Oh well.

Installation Hell

There are many ways to install software and they all require a lot of nonsense. I’ve settled on using apt if possible, even if it requires sudo cat whatever to /etc/whatever. I mean, look at this nonsense required to install Terraform! WTF is any of that? The only reason I trust it is because it’s from their website¹.

Finding install instructions for software was not easy. My general strategy was to ask an AI, then use what it told me to find the actual instructions from the vendor or developer’s website. The AI was usually accurate, but given that I have no fucking idea what gpg --dearmor does, I wasn’t about to trust it outright.

I realize that each distro having at least one, if not three, package managers makes this problem difficult for maintainers and vendors. I also think creating yet more package managers is not a solution. Ideally, there could be some repository of “here’s how to install this software on this distro” metadata that maintainers could provide, but that’s not how things work.

Notifications are Cursed

No app seems able to consistently maintain its own state and the state of its notifications, nor do they respond to clicks consistently.

For example, Ghostty allows apps to send notifications. When this happens, I click the notification and…nothing happens. Sometimes the notification is removed from the notification center, sometimes not. But clicking it never activates Ghostty. Another example is Fastmail - it shows a badge and a notification for some number of unread messages. Sometimes that number is the exact number of unread messages! Frequently, it is not.

However notifications work under the hood, it’s either broken by design, or so complicated that no apps can figure out how to use it properly. I would honestly prefer if apps just ran xmessage (not that you can programmatically activate and raise an app reliably [ and yes, I have the Gnome extension that claims to do that and it sometimes works! ])

Stuff I Still Need a Mac For

I still use my Mac for a few things:

• Apple Ecosystem stuff like iPhotos. These can be read from Linux via the iCloud website, but my iPhone photos go here.
• Right-click in Finder to scan documents from my Phone. OMG this is so useful, especially during the US’s tax season!
• iMessage - having to use my phone only for text messaging my friends sucks.
• Pixelmator and Omnigraffle are great apps. I don’t use them often, but they work well.

Where I go From Here

Because of xremap it’s in good enough shape that I can use this laptop without losing my mind and wreaking havoc with learned keyboard shortcuts. I disabled a lot of pre-existing shortcuts and generally have a setup that isn’t hard to use.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m using AI code generators to understand how they work and how to use them, and doing this on a Linux box means the blast radius is contained. There’s nothing on this laptop’s hard drive that matters.

But even beyond that, I am enjoying using it. I realize there are other distros and other window managers and all that. I think for this second attempt, since I wrote down everything I had to do to set stuff up, I’m more confident in trying another window manager or distro². You can see my setup scripts in all their glory if you want to see what I’ve done.

For now, Desktop Linux is working well as a dev machine, despite my many complaints above.