I have a relatively new laptop, and have spent some time today fixing some of the rough edges in my setup. (One day I'll throw all the config files into git, or something, but not yet.)

  • I use zsh, but only in a fairly conservative manner, to emulate/mimic bash. All searches on the subject of zsh prompts seem to produce ugly behemoths from people who have just discovered that the feature exists. Here's my effort to copy Debian's normal bash prompt:

    PS1='%n@%m:%~$ '
    

    I also "setopt nohup", and copy some useful stuff like ls colour aliases from .bashrc.
  • Most tutorials on configuring SMTP auth with Postfix are insane. If your mail provider's CA is in the ca-certificates package, you can postpone learning openssl yet again.
  • I'm trying out an xmonad/gnome combination, having evaluated awesome (tricky to get all the details of the gnome integration working) and bluetile (tricky to get the single-pixel window decoration feel). So far it works well.