Setup

My Windows laptop configuration as a computer engineering student.

Philosophy

Best of Both Worlds

Windows and Linux excel at different things:

• Windows has a better GUI and more powerful productivity apps
• Linux is better for programming

I use each OS to their advantage by running Windows on my personal device and using WSL to get a Linux environment on it.

WSL vs dual-boot

Dual-booting Windows and Linux is another way of running both OS's on a device, but WSL offers very similar performance in the majority of tasks while being much more convenient: WSL distributions can be started in a matter of seconds and can be used simultaneously with Windows apps. Especially with WSL adding the support for Linux GUI apps in Windows 11, there are a dwindling number of reasons to dual-boot. Some reasons include WSL's poor filesystem performance and the computer having little RAM (< 16GB).

Minimize Mouse Usage

Every switch between using the mouse and keyboard takes time and energy, both of which I have little of. Thus, I use:

• Vim commands. See the IDE page to learn more.
• Keyboard shortcuts in Windows as much as possible. See the Windows Keyboard Shortcuts page for a list of the shortcuts I frequently use.

Same Experience Across Computers and Programs

To have the same experience on all the computers I use (personal, work, school, homelab), I:

1. Created a dotfiles repository that contains my dotfiles and an installation script
2. Standardized keyboard shortcuts across programs
   • Largely based on my Vim and Microsoft Edge keyboard shortcuts
3. Standardized CLI configuration across shells
4. Wrote these notes so that I remember how everything works