Oddbean

Mad and linux-ish suggestion: if you are very very very used to vim keybindings you can try qutebrowser, bit that's more a side-broswer than a daily driver. Jokes aside, Mint is really good. My suggestion is to try to not to be dispersive with regards to the installation methods for the software you install, meaning that going with flatpak+.deb+snap+.AppImage+source ecc can make the update of dependencies and software very cumbersome. Instead, try to centralize into a few methods...for ideological reasons I would not recommend Snap, go for flatpak. I don't know how the "windows emulator" market is for Apple products, for GNU/Linux you have mainly Wine. But overall Wine is not very good, try to avoid emulation if possibile. If you're using Gnome as a DE I suggest to proritize the utilities that Gnome bundles in its suite...they're very nice and well done.

i3 is genuinely the best WM out there...I highly prefer that WM approach to the classical DE approach. For several reasons I find myself now using Gnome and no tiling at all and it's painful XD. With i3 you push yourself to minimizing the amount of time spent in GUI and maximizing the terminal usage...that helps a lot to learn exponentially. That's why I like i3. With regards to qutebrowser, have you tried it?

I just really despise using a mouse and fiddling around with high-friction window activities. I typically have very direct goals and should be able to achieve them with a keystroke or two. 95% of that can be achieved in terminal+tmux+vim. For everything else, I expect the rest of my environment to work as close to tmux+vim as possible. is that too much to ask?! lol Yep, I use qutebrowser. I like it for the obvious reasons you can guess from my above comment. Lack of extensions is a bit of a problem for some things wrt nostr, bitcoin, etc. but for most everyday browsing it is excellent.

Thanks. I've been flatpak and apt so far. Trying to keep things as stock as possible so I'm actually using Linux instead of trying to emulate anything (so emulators are definitely out). Thanks for the tips! And no, after many failed attempts VIM is still dark magic I'll never understand. 😆