Spacemacs

The Cost of Decentralization I have been a happy Artix Linux user for several months. I had got the setup to be exactly as I liked. The choice of the distribution was prompted by a desire to contribute to the cause of keeping Linux decentralized. (See videos form Youtux.) Artix helped me retain the use of the package ecosystem of Arch while using an init system that isn’t systemd (something monolythic and centralizing) (I was using OpenRC), and without being tied to the wayland display server (which, again, seems to be pushed upon us by corporate forces in Linux (I was using XLibre, although, sadly, Artix just reverted to X.org). It needed more configuration than some of the other distros I have used. But for a one-time setup, I did not mind that. ...

All I wanted was to use magit today, but Spacemacs, which I have used for years, wouldn’t allow me. I could not figure out what the problem was—it likely had something to with dependencies that were out of sync. Failing to resolve the issue, I decided to reinstall emacs and configure it from scratch (with some great LLM help). The fruits of this tinkering are in the init.el file below. It is only about 160 lines long, but covers the vast majority of my requirements surprisingly well. This is a brief log of how this config file came about. ...