My new Framework setup made me go touch grass more

When I bought my first Linux laptop, the Framework 13, I decided I wanted to do something different. Similar to how I wanted to forego prebuilt blog themes for my personal blog and instead let the style reflect my person, I also wanted to opt for a completely bare distro that would allow me to configure my laptop just how I saw fit. Nothing more, nothing less.

So I took the leap from the pristine, pre-configured, predictable (and pedantic) macOS experience, and embarked on a journey to a barren land where I could re-experience that feeling I had discovering Minecraft Creative Mode for the first time.

As any self-respecting Terraform monkey, I decided that reproducibility and configuration as code was paramount for a computer I’ll probably use within neovim for 80% of the time, so my distro of choice had to be NixOS. “You can roll it back if you mess up, you won’t have to lose time over your config at work”, I told myself. (lmao)

After the initial glee from clicking in the RAM and screwing in the SSD into my Framework’s mainboard, I was delighted with the typical black, neon green and white logs that the Linux boot process spits out as it comes to life.

Booting up into Hyprland, with an anime girl already blessing my screen, I immediately sobered up as I realised my next task would be to configure my laptop’s suspend routine upon shutting the lid. It felt like this journey to rice land will instead be death by a thousand cuts: writing dotfile incantations to make the bluetooth daemon come up, commiserating over stack traces with fellow users on the Nix and Hyprland forums and giving up my productivity to write Nix packages so I can use the newest Charmbracelet TUI.

To be fair, in all this gloom, there was a silver lining: I had broken the contract that came to define my development enviromnent, both virtual and physical. Finding difficulties getting my Magic Trackpad and Keyboard to work with NixOS, I realised something about how I’ve been approaching the ergonomics of my setup. See, I am a remote worker, so in addition to my blog and laptop configuration, I also get to decide my daily physical work environment.

In my ambition to set up an ergonomic office setup where I can give my undivided attention to the task at hand, however, I really locked myself in a no-win situation. I could stay at home, and use the expensive standing desk, wide monitor and IBM-approved screen-to-eye distance, or I can exploit the remote worker benefit and go and explore one of the many coworking cafes around Taipei. Regardless of choice, I would subconsciously agonise over this every day, feeling a certain level of unsatisfaction with the opportunity cost.

But with the ergonomics of my bluetooth keyboard and trackpad gone, that setup dichotomy was shattered, and I was free to just do whatever. I tried new brunch spots, quirky cafes and found new nooks in Taipei’s sweltering urban jungle where I could focus amidst crowds of shoppers and commutters intermingling. And, for the first time in almost a year and a half, I can say that Bogdan’s Taipei Spots list is updated once again.