Digital Minimalism

I heard a kid today talking with friends about how they play the "battery game" every day to help them stay off their phone. The goal is simply to have as high a battery percentage on your phone as possible when you get home. Interesting, isn't it?!

I started doing this for a few hours before lunch to extend my battery life, but found that it actually improved my attention and productivity. I also made better choices from my less distracted state, in particular deciding I could skip an unhealthy snack etc.

Drew a picture and wrote this morning. It was quite nice.

Cross-posted from here.

quitsocialmedia.club is also a minimalist website: It is part of the 1MB club.

A FOSS Android Launcher with a minimal, distraction free UI. Fork of Slim-launcher.

minimalistic xmobar inspired status bar, in a terminal emulator.

Dependency :

• POSIX-compliant shell: printf, set, unset, shift, test, while, continue, break, return, case, trap, getopts
• stty
• tr
• dd
• cat

Hi. Taking inspiration from this post I'm sharing my Void Linux setup. As you can see, it's a very minimalist, KISS, UNIX-like one, as Void Linux is by default. The specs, commented:

Window manager: Openbox. Because it's lightweight and fast, pretty "naked" by default, but you can do whatever you want with it. As you can see, I don't use toolbars, but neither app launchers, archive managers (GUI nor CLI, I just type my way through the system), not even a wallpaper is set. This is because I spend here most of the time on the terminal and maybe browsing the web or reading some PDF docs. The key for everything are keyboard shortcuts: I can launch apps, work around windows (close, minimize, resize, cycling, tiling...), control sound and brightness , take a screenshot... Just by the right shortcut. Trackpad is mostly to select fields on Firefox and so on.

Web browsers: Firefox. Because it's FOSS and does everything is expected from a browser inside the over complicated bloat mess that modern web pages are. And links because, believe it or not, a CLI web browser has its use cases nowadays. I don't need, say, Firefox if I'm just going to read some wiki article.

Terminal: st. Because, you know, it's so simple and fast. I just patch it to have scrollback, and add some padding and a background colour slightly lighter than black, so it won't disappear inside the black background.

Shell: dash, which doesn't even have tab completion, it's really minimal. I love to type full commands and folder directions I guess. ;)

Text editor: vi or vim If I write some code -I'm trying to learn Python ATM- I use vim, just vi for a casual dotfile edit and so on. It's a prefered choice for a lot of hackers (I mean, people who know their way around computer issues), and once you get to it you understand why. I have WordGrinder too, which I use for non-coding text, it also runs on CLI and lets you export to markdown, html, odt...

Music player: moc (Music on Console). And that's it, a handy music player which runs on terminal emulators and is as featherweight as a music player can be.

PDF viewer: Zathura Because it's nice, has vim-like shortcuts and the minimal bloat, it seems.

Image viewer: feh. Small, powerful and command-line based, it lets you set a wallpaper and view pics, and that's mostly it.

System monitor: Conky. As I don't have background daemons, toolbar applets or anything watchdog-ing my laptop's battery, something that prints charge levels on screen seems handy, and it is. And I can check date/hour, system temp and stuff included with the admitance fee. ;) To have it always on view I have a top margin so windows are not covering the conky "toolbar".

And that's mostly it. No systemd and not much in the background (tlp, ufw, wpa_supplicant, acpid, the ttys and that's moslty it), it starts with ~100 MB RAM, it's a couple of seconds until passes the BIOS screen and you can login, and the battery lasts for long, long hours.

I love CLI, I love KISS, I love simple things, and I can be more productive and spend my time better when I'm with a computer this way.

Greetings.

This is the things I use on my computer. :)

Conditions for a good software accoridng to me

• Least number of visual stimulations. No notifications, no sounds, no tons of button everywhere... Best if it can be only used using keyboard.
• Light, my computer also wants to benefit from minimalism.
• Respects its users. It needs to be "free software" (free as freedom)
• Being necessary for you.

The basic stuff

• Xubuntu is my operating system.
• dwm (plus dmenu) is my window manager. Everything is done using a few shortcuts and takes no space on the screen. The shortcuts are easy to get, but the installation might be tricky for new linux users.
• st is my terminal. I use it for coding, writing and managing my system. The only thing I changed to it was to change the fontsize and enable the scrollback patch. But again it might be tricky to install for new linux users.

Browsing online

I already tried other stuff like "surf" but I don't like it because I want to use an adblocker.

• Firefox is my favorite browser. I use it because it's lighter than other browsers, and I can install uBlock Origin.

Writing

I need to write things for school and for myself. So I mainly use Marktext or nano to write my stuff.

• Marktext is a markdown editor. I like markdown because I don't want to pass the majority of my time on choosing fonts and stuff like that. Also I think it's more handy and reliable. I only use this app for exporting into pdf. I write using nano
• Nano is a terminal-based editor. Very easy to use, only terminal based. I use for both writing markdown and writing code.
• Libreoffice if I really need to have a "classic" office suite.

Communication

Chatting

• dino (xmpp client), it is my favorite chatting software. I like it more than Discord because, instead of joining a ton of useless channels, you only join the ones you want. (Also it's lighter than Matrix.)
• HexChat is my favorite IRC client. Yes I still use IRC, it's so simple and stupid, I love it!

Emails

• Thunderbird, it has a very "brut" interface, but very handy and powerful. You can setup filters to automatically clean your inbox. I never get up to 20 messages in my inbox this way.

Coding

I use nano as my code editor. That's it, same thing as said above.

• nano and st is my IDE :)
• openscad is the cad software I use. Basically, design things in 3D using code.

Video

• Shotcut is a nice video editor. Pretty straight forward. When I need something more advanced, I use kdenlive.
• VLC is a nice video viewer.

Photo

• Firefox is my image viewer.
• GIMP is my image editor. I don't want to use photoshop.

Sound

• Audacity is useful when I need to record sound
• pavucontrol is the tool I use to manage the input/output audio stuff.
• Musecore is a score editor I use to digitalize and read piano scores.

I'm fond of the idea that a dumbphone can detach us from tech in a meaningful way. I'm slowly adding components of this decentralized electronic device/system in my life. I have a DSLR for photos, a laptop for learning, working and leisure, a Fiio M3K digital audio player for music. I require gps for navigation in my day-to-day travels. I'm at the point where I'd like to ditch my android smartphone and go with a 4G LTE dumbphone that is compatible in both North America and Europe.

Since the phone being produced by Mudita OS doesn't come out until April, maybe I should get a used, de-googled phone off of eBay to try out in the interim? Then I can "have the facts"and see if I should keep a smartphone, albeit a de-googled one with me, or just keep on the path of having a device for each need that I have.

Thoughts on this?

I found this person's gemlog while browsing random Gemini sites and they had an interesting take on the whole digital minimalism movement. Essentially, their point is that you shouldn't just be aiming to blindly reduce all your screen time, but instead make sure the things you use your screen time on are meaningful and fulfilling. What do y'all think?

Gemini source: gemini://gemini.archwizard.xyz/personallog/pursuit-of-intentionality.gmi

Three decades after publishing his controversial 1988 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” in Harper’s Magazine, Mr. Berry still doesn’t own one. He doesn’t have a smartphone either.

The start of my journey with a brick-phone.

(I only get on social media on an actual computer (chromebook) with a keyboard and everything)