New job, new OS

For a decade, I've been paid to write software, most of the time as developer for native iOS-apps. In these years, I not only learned how to write apps using Objective-C and Swift, I also learned a thing or two about software development and how to computer. This skills and general knowledge has not only proven to be way more valuable, it also serves as foundation for my most recent freelance gig: I've been working as Python developer on a FastAPI-based project for a client for nearly a month now.

For that project, I decided to go with Linux for various reasons — mostly one piece of legacy software, that doesn't run easily on Apple Silicon: An old version of MySQL. This is a hard requirement and my colleagues solved that issue by running it in a docker container, but I wasn't so keen to install that on my main computer either. And as I bought a used Thinkpad T490s a few months ago, I thought: Fuck it, let's give it a try. I spent an evening setting up everything and have been working with it since then.

I went with Fedora and GNOME and after struggling a bit with PyCharms performance due to the age of the computer, I went back to basics: vim and CLI. And gosh, this is unexpectedly convenient to work with and also fun!

After installing fish a custom color scheme for vim and download a new font for ... everything CLI, it even looks good now. Also GNOME is surprisingly flawless to work with: It has a good enough window management, updates automatically, comes with an app store and you can even take screenshots.

On Mastodon, someone accidentally pointed me to GNOME Tweaks and that solved my last pain: I used that to remap CAPS LOCK to ESC and now I can also rely on my muscle memory in vim. I could get used to that setup — also Python and FastAPI and pytest is fun. In fact, I don't recall the last time I wrote some code for an iOS-app.

It also surprised me how quickly I can replace my entire working environment and adopt to new projects, programming languages and circumstances.