"The year of the Linux desktop still isn’t upon us (in 2026), and part of the reason why it has taken so long to get to that point is fundamental: a lot of the people who use Linux love fiddling with configuration files to reshape their system"

"part of the reason", yes, besides people's familiarity with Windows, it being pre-installed, Linux's splintered ecosystem in general, games, drivers for hardware, and so much more...

But what I want to contribute: LLMs like codex can be brilliant for custom setups, maybe not for the layman, but for the now lazy but previously-into-tuning your setup person with an itch remaining. For years I've not been wanting to tune my system, I have actual work to do. A few hours spent configuring a tool for small marginal gains is hours I could spend more productively.

Hence, Default Ubuntu with Gnome, good enough, let's do actual work. But I as I get to work more away from my desk setup (hence away from a docking station and external monitors) and more on my Laptop alone, I recently started to long for my i3 setup from years ago...

A few hours of prompting codex and I have sway set up w/ vim like keybindings, all the information I want in a task bar (I couldn't even tell you which, swaybar I think), a good launcher for applications that I like (it's graphically fancier than the simple default launchers for tiling wms), have kitty as terminal with awesome shortcuts for tab navigation, have bash aliases for saving and loading terminal sessions, no shortcuts (sway versus vim vs kitty) are in conflict, all overlap beautifully and make sense (different modifier keys, but same vim motion like fundamentals). I can simply pull the plug on my docking station or re-attach and everything keeps being fine.

So I have a custom setup, custom to me, that especially on a single screen makes me far more productive, setting it up is 10% the time it used to be, making changes in the future will be 10% it used to be, and I still a) leveraged the capabilities for customization and b) it being simple text based configs I can still leverage that going forward and c) have still the insight if needed (looking at the configs).

Codex on Linux in general feels like a super power. Due to the heavy text-based workflow Linux allows for, the Composability of terminal tools etc, I doubt working together with an LLM on setting up a system could work so well on any other system.

You see this a lot with beginners, because until you’ve done the work long enough to truly know what works, you only really know what you have seen through other people’s performance of the work (to the degree it is even understandable and perceptible to you). Also your social circle is probably mostly other beginners or more experienced people who are evaluating you in terms of basic competency/understanding as someone who knows more than a guy off the street who wants to be or claims to be capable of something.

So the costly/difficult-to-fake signaling of competency through complex setups, or tool fluency, has very high personal value because it positions you as someone who is interested and capable of learning about this stuff. And if you don’t have any real work to do yet, or even know what it is all the work is actually done for, it’s the most obvious place to start.

Once you understand this you can start to understand how developer tools marketing actually works, and why “this completely eliminated that problem entirely!” is NOT what developers get excited about paying for or using unless it’s something they/their social peers don’t value. Conversely, if you create a vessel for them to participate in some kind of social trend/signaling game within their social world it stops mattering as much or not it’s more productive or doesn’t actually save any time.

This applies in almost all social systems, if you’re interested in learning more about it some good terms are “costly signaling”, “mechanism design”, and animal psychology. Just don’t let yourself think you’re too smart to do it yourself - it’s inherent to the act of socializing, so anytime you’re doing that, your perceptible behavioral signals are going to affect the outcome, whether you like it or not

Good Editors are Invisible would make more sense. I think this only applies to the class of tools we would call "controllers"

"invisible" is something I used to describe emacs magit. It's a thin layer over git output, it pops up, it infers parameters from ui state, call the usual git command, and goes out. Lean and fast (unless large project it seems).

I have a methodological explanation why good tools are invisible. Explained it here: https://nextmovetheory.com/library/the-nature-of-product/epi...

word for word why softwares like herdr, haicue, ampcode is getting adopted for ai tooling where it is hot, although just because its cli bound it doesnt mean you cant have elaborate almost-gui text interfaces... lynx is a good example from past.

Vim is a bad example to use here. I certainly have no hacker-vibe pretensions, I use Xcode almost exclusively, but with the Vim key bindings which have been integrated very well. The productivity gains with Vim commands are impressive.

Progressive disclosure is a good framing. Sane defaults keep common workflows fast, while a well-designed escape hatch lets advanced users solve exceptional cases without making every screen noisy.

Keybooard and Mouse. Everytime. I have the same question.

How much do you type in a day that moving the hand to the mouse is a productivity loss? I spend a lot of time staring (thinking, planning) than typing. So, moving my hand to the mouse and back barely has any impact.

I was once in a meeting with a guy for a specific purpose and he wasted about 10 minutes lecturing me on why he uses vim, I had no issue with it but honestly that entire world is absurd to me, do what you want as long as it works for you