Linux desktop on Tom Meurs

Linux Is for Everyone: Why This Blog Now Welcomes Beginners Too

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:28:00 +0100

My neighbour is 70 years old. He’s used Windows his whole life. Last month he asked me: “Tom, I keep hearing about Linux. Is that something for me too?”

He’s not the first. Over the past year I’ve had the same question from friends, family and colleagues, each in their own shape. “I want to get off Windows, but where do I start?” “Is Linux hard?” “Can I still use my normal programs?” To me these are easy questions. I’ve been running Linux since SuSE 6.0, back when you picked your hardware by whether a Linux driver existed for it. If you’ve never seen a terminal, they’re not easy at all.

Learn the Defaults: Why Portability Beats Customization

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:47:00 +0100

TL;DR I spent years polishing a vim and tmux setup, then sat useless in front of a stock vim on a production server. So I learned the defaults I’d been overriding all along, and moved my customizations on top of them instead of in place of them. What that looks like for vim, tmux and the shell tools, and the four checks I use to find the gaps.

For years my setup was the thing I was proudest of. A dotfiles repo with commits going back further than some of my jobs, a vim config that pulled in thirty plugins, the tmux prefix moved somewhere comfortable, a prompt that took a weekend to get right. Down to the last keybinding, it was mine. On my laptop I was fast, and I hardly thought about the tools at all. Muscle memory did the work.

Terminal Multiplexing: tmux vs Zellij vs Screen

Thu, 14 May 2026 19:00:00 +0100

The first time it bit me I was halfway through a database migration over SSH. The train went into a tunnel, the WiFi dropped, and the process on the other end died with the connection. I sat looking at a dead prompt, wondering how much of the migration had committed.

A multiplexer would have saved me that hour. The process keeps running on the server whether I’m attached or not, so a dropped connection costs me a reconnect and nothing else. I reattach and the work is where I left it. That one property is why a multiplexer goes on every machine I touch, before the editor and before the dotfiles.

Dotfile Management with mise and chezmoi: The Perfect Combo

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:23:00 +0100

TL;DR Six ways of syncing dotfiles later, the one I kept is chezmoi for the files and mise for the tool versions, with the mise config living inside the chezmoi repo. Templates handle the work laptop against the personal desktop, age handles the secrets, and a fresh machine is one command and about five minutes. The walk-through goes from one managed file to the bootstrap I run for real.

My .zshrc is older than some of my coworkers’ careers. Same for my .vimrc and my tmux config. They’ve grown into a setup that does exactly what I want, and I’d be lost without them. The catch is that I run more than one machine. A laptop, a desktop, now and then a throwaway VM for testing. For years, keeping those in sync was a pile of hacks I didn’t trust.

Arch vs NixOS as a Workstation: Professional and Personal Use

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:28:00 +0100

TL;DR I’ve run Arch and NixOS as my daily machine, and today it’s Arch on both desktops and NixOS on the servers. Arch’s reputation for breaking is mostly a missing snapshot. With btrfs, Snapper, dotfiles in git and a package list, a rollback takes 2 minutes and the fear of updates goes away. NixOS earns its learning curve when several machines have to stay identical, and on a server I wouldn’t run anything else.