My Setup

I started my linux journey 3 years ago with Void Linux, using dwm as my window manager. Ever since my software stack has barely changed, as I'm comfortable with it and I see no reason to change it for now.

But why Void? Well, one thing I expect from my systems is for them to be stable, transparent and predictable, and Void has lived up to those expectations.

The init system and the service supervisor are dead simple. The package manager, XBPS, is quick, but most importantly, it handles dependencies cleanly. Overall the system is modular you could say, in a UNIXy kind of way, where each little gear does one thing and does it well.

As for dwm, while it may seem too extreme, especially for someone who doesn't know C, the minimal amount of dependencies and the fact that what you see is what you get makes it extremely predictable. You also don't really need to be an expert in C. If you know how to apply patches then you're good to go.

Projects

• I have an Acer Chromebook Spin 511 with a Celeron N5100 and 8GB of RAM that I got for 60 euro. I flashed my own custom build of MrChromebox UEFI firmware, which basically has Slackware's tux with the pipe as a bootsplash and a custom EC firmware packaged inside of it, which is necessary for a feature called "EC Softare Sync" to behave correctly. The rest of the stack is just what I described in the "My Setup" section.

• I also have this Xiaomi Redmi Note 10S for which I tried to swap the screen unsuccessfully (it was for the wrong model), so I ended up with a phone with a touchsreen that doesn't work. So I used mtkclient, which uses exploits in the SoC, to unlock the bootloader and flash my own partitions.

  I used a downstream postmarketOS kernel with a modified initramfs for a custom bootsplash, and built my own void linux rootfs for it. You can only connect to it via USB networking (since the kernel doesn't support anything else). It basically acts as a headless server.

• I recently got a CRT monitor for 10 euro and I've been messing around with it. I made my own EDID blob with CRU and then manually tweaked it with a hex editor to set my screen's physical size and after that set the corresponding checksum. This fits more neatly into the graphics stack and makes more sense than using Xorg modelines.

  What's specially cool about this setup is that it runs on an NVIDIA GTX 970, which has a DVI-I port, for which use a DVI-I to VGA passive adapter to connect the monitor. So the GPU natively works with analog signals, no overhead. Additionally I run an uncomposited Xorg session. This is essentially as low latency as you can get.

Music

One of the main things I take pride in is my music collection. My collection is mostly comprised of ~128kbps VBR Opus, though for some tracks that are hard to find I keep a FLAC and then encode them into Opus. I also have some 256kbps AAC here and there.

I also really enjoy oldskool UK dubstep (artists like Skream, Digital Mystikz, Mala, etc.), for which I make sure to have FLAC because dubstep relies on a lot of sub-bass frequencies and tiny details and ambience.

To ensure that the FLACs are genuine lossless transfers I analyze them on a spectrogram. This involves going one by one and manually checking that there are no artifacts or features that are characteristic to other lossy formats.

As for the metadata I use MusicBrainz Picard. This program checks a massive database of songs, albums, artists, etc. called MusicBrainz and assigns the corresponding tags to the track.

It has some cool features like automatically detecting what track it is with an "AcoustID" fingerprint, though I prefer to manually search for the track on the database to make sure that it's the version I'm looking for.

email: [email protected]