2020 Update: a new “cd” (see bottom of post)

This article is due at least in part as a response to Olivier Lacan’s post,

“cd is Wasting Your Time”

After finding this post in r/Linux, I felt I agreed with the comments more so than the article. It’s fairly obvious that most Linux power users rarely ever touch cd when working in their interactive shell, and Olivier’s examples only made us cringe harder.

Take a look at the first few examples he gave of what a ‘routine’ shell use log might look like, and tell me that’s really how you want to use your shell?

If you know me well, you’ve probably already heard of the slew of tricks I have up my .zshrc, but as it turns out, most of those tricks aren’t really that tricky!

Oh gosh what happened to my configs…

I swear they’re around here somewhere.

It’s only been a month. I’m already tired of Gnome Shell.

Man, I wish I had Unity back.

But for now, I guess that’s not gonna happen. (I prefer support and available resources to continuing to use a deprecated piece of software, so let’s pretend Unity was already sliced and diced for this article.)

Gnome Shell has had a number of issues in 17.10, hopefully getting fixed in 18.04. But for now, while I’m on 17.10 and fighting with a number of non-gui related issues, I just want a good desktop experience that I can get work done with.

Note! Outdated content ahead! Skip to the update!

Just browsing reddit one day, when this comes along.

This looks interesting, so I said I would test it out, let’s get started.

As my daily driver for a year now, the Oryx Pro (orxp1) laptop from System76 has been an extremely enjoyable experience.

If you didn’t already know, System76 sells Linux / Ubuntu laptops. The hardware supports Linux out of the box, and System76 provides support and drivers to the customers for additional features.

I bought the Oryx Pro in June of 2016 while working at ORNL, and since then I have not regretted my decision.