:rice: Tina's Dotfiles

What are Dotfiles?

A dotfile is a commonly misused word to talk about configuration files, because configuration files often begin with a dot (.), e.g., .bashrc.

Why publishing them?

1. For personal use: Having them available on GitHub helps me syncing my configuration files across devices, making me faster to use a new machine. It also serves as a back-up if anything goes wrong.
2. To share knowledge: Sometimes manpages aren't enough. Seeing how other people use and configure their software can help you understand what are the possible scenarios for a program, or help you learn stuff you didn't know.
3. To help beginners getting started: My dotfiles are voluntarly unoponionated. Nothing in my dotfiles should reflect my personal use-case, nothing is tied to how or where I store files or to my personal habits. This might help people not advanced enough getting a beautiful desktop base.

Screenshots showcase

Current

Olders

Quick setup

1. Clone this repository somewhere you won't move it. I store it in ~/Repositories/Tina-otoge/Dotfiles.
2. Go to your ~/.config directory.
3. Create symlinks of the configuration folder from the softwares you want, e.g., ln -sf ../Repositories/skielred/Dotfiles/i3 . (maybe do backups first)
4. Create additional symlinks for softwares that don't store their configuration in ~/.config.

   cd
   ln -sf .config/bash/bashrc .bashrc
   ln -sf .config/zsh/zshrc .zshrc
   ln -sf .config/x11/Xresources .Xresources
   # etc...

The -f flag for ln will overwrite files with the same name.

Tips

Extending the packages repositories on Fedora

Default Fedora packages policy is to authorize strictly free software. There are softwares which are free (doesn't cost money) but don't release all of their source code publicly. And you may want some of those softwares directly from your package manager.

RPMFusion is a very popular repository (made of multiple big user-maintained repositories). You will find a lot of softwares in it such as Steam. Installing RPMFusion

Fedora also has a user-maintained repositories system called copr. This is similar to ArchLinux's AUR. You have to enable a user's repository, then you can install a package from it as if you were trying to install it normally.

Example:

dnf copr enable user/repo
dnf install package

Notable copr repositories I have enabled:

dnf copr enable fuhrmann/i3-gaps # i3 fork with sexy gaps between windows

The Fedora repo is so complete that I haven't touched any copr in a long time.

Avoid massive plugins distributions

If you want to build up knowledge about the softwares you use, and master them, avoid things like oh-my-zsh, oh-my-fish or SpaceVim. Even though they can seem appealing, you'll most likely be able to achieve the same features they have by manually picking up and installing plugins or adding a few lines of configuration. But with the benefit of knowing what changes you made from the default configuration and what they do exactly.

Use Flatpak when it makes sense

Flatpak is freedesktop's solution to standardized app distribution for Linux, and is endorsed and fairly integrated in Entreprise Linux' family of distros.

Compared to the alternatives (AppImage, snap, manually installing tarballs), it has major benefits and no apparent drawbacks. One of its core features is to containerize apps and using a permission system to only allow what the app actually needs (restrict filesystem access, network access, etc, similar to Android). It also has a working dependency system, mitigating duplication of libraries.

I recommend using it for userland applications, things such as Steam, Discord, GIMP, Slack, make sense as a Flatpak.

The list will grow as more useful tips comes to my mind.

Softwares recommendation

In the terminal

On the desktop

Utilities

Applications

The list will grow as more softwares that deserve to be recommended comes to my mind.

Need help?

Maybe open an issue or ask me on Twitter @Tina_otoge or Discord Tina#1998.