To my knowledge, that is controlled by your window manager/DE.
gramgan
The people I know in my program (undergrad History) use their computers for little more than Google Chrome (specifically Google’s Office suite), a PDF reader (sometimes also Google Chrome), sometimes Zotero, and sometimes MS Word. We get a lot of Mac’s around here, so one can imagine Microsoft products are not highly relied upon, generally speaking.
Everything’s through the browser nowadays, so I’d say just pick a stable distro, install 2 or three browsers in case something doesn’t work (like Google Docs with Firefox in my experience…), and submit everything as PDF.
Can’t speak much to LibreOffice as I write my papers in Typst (and before that in LaTeX, which got me brownie points with some of the older professors), which I find much faster, easier, and more flexible than WYSIWYG word processors.
Damn polybar looks much easier to configure than waybar…
Fourthing sway, specifically swayfx and (as someone already mentioned) autotiling, both of which are available in the Nix repository without hassle.
qutebrowser and Nyxt are both projects I desperately want to be capable of replacing my web browser.
As far as rounded corners and easy to use, I’ve had a tremendous time with swayfx for the past few months, which I switched to from Hyprland.
I used Doom for a while, but it was still slow. I’ve been replacing emacs with more unix-y tools (helix/neovim as editor, yazi for file manager, etc.). I really just miss the design of emacs (the self-documentation, the infinite extensibility, etc.). I hope someday maybe Lem will fill my needs (which I just learned about yesterday).
A fine day that will be!
That’s my first time hearing of Lem—it looks fantastic. What’s the issue with it on NixOS?
The most satisfying part of the NixOS process is deploying to bare metal and watching it work exactly as you intend it to
As far as where you get the music from, you’ll have to determine for yourself what audio quality you require.
To test this, use something like Soulseek to get a high quality version of a song you are very familiar with, and then get the same song off of YouTube with
yt-dlp
(better yet—do this for a few songs). Then, open both songs in separate media player windows, randomize the layout of said windows so you don’t remember which is which, plug in your favorite headphones and see if you can guess which is which.For me, I found the difference between a lossless or 320kbps download from Soulseek and a 128-196kbps download from YouTube to be negligible (or outright nonexistent) in most cases, so I mostly download off of YouTube, which is very simple to do.
Depending on where you get the files, you may need to add metadata yourself. For this, I recommend MusicBrainz Picard.