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.

KVM/QEMU Scripts and Aliases: Making Virtualization Actually Usable

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:17:00 +0100

I run VMs all day. A Kubernetes deployment I want to test, a distro I read about, Windows for that one stubborn application, an experiment I’d rather not run on my actual machine. KVM/QEMU is the right tool for all of it. It lives in the Linux kernel and runs close to native speed. Nothing in it phones home, and no vendor gets a say in what I do with my own hardware.

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.

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.

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.

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.

YubiKey + Pass + GPG + SSH: One Key to Rule Them All

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:00:00 +0100

TL;DR One YubiKey carries a GPG key with a signing, an encryption and an authentication subkey. gpg-agent hands the authentication subkey to SSH, git signs with the signing subkey and pass decrypts with the encryption subkey, so one PIN in the morning and a touch per action replace every password I used to type. The SSH part alone is three steps and worth doing on its own.

Every morning I plug in my YubiKey, type one PIN, and that’s the last secret I type until I pull it out again. SSH to a server, no password. Sign a commit, no passphrase. Pull a secret out of pass, touch the key. One thing in a USB port, and the rest of the day my authentication happens without me.

Pass: the Unix password manager that just works

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0100

TL;DR pass keeps each password as a GPG-encrypted file in a directory, and the directory is the whole data model. pass -c email/gmail puts a password in your clipboard from any terminal, pass git push backs the store up, and the fzf script further down is how I look up every password I have. The price is GPG key management, and it’s a real price.

I used KeePass for years. Then 1Password. Then Bitwarden. All decent tools, and every one of them was too much for what I asked of it. Too much UI, too many features, and a password always lived on the other side of an app I had to alt-tab into. A small interruption, and they added up.

GPG explained: from first key to daily use

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:00:00 +0100

TL;DR GPG encrypts files and signs things, and it sits under pass, under signed git commits and under the checksums maintainers publish. One command gives you a working keypair in five minutes. Subkeys and a YubiKey come later, if ever, and the UX is bad enough that I complain about it at length below.

GPG is a tool I kept meaning to learn and didn’t, for years. The docs are a wall of text, the terminology is its own dialect, and the error messages are cryptic in both senses of the word.

Taskwarrior, Timewarrior and Vit: The Ultimate CLI Productivity Stack

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:00:00 +0100

TL;DR Taskwarrior, timewarrior and vit are my task list, my time tracking and the vim-style screen on top, all in the terminal and all plain text in ~/.task. Two commands get you started. The rest of this post is what I bolted on afterwards, from projects and dependencies to a self-hosted sync server, and you can stop at any section.

For context on how my brain works, see Working with an AuDHD Brain.

Working with an AuDHD brain: why I automate everything

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0100

For a long time I thought the problem was me.

I have AuDHD , autism and ADHD together. The ADHD is ADHD-PI, the inattentive kind, without the hyperactivity most people picture when they hear the word. For years I treated the whole thing as a defect I’d train away. I bought the planners. I read the productivity books. Every week I told myself that Monday I’d finally be disciplined.