I’m a professor of Religious Studies with a research focus on medieval Islam, particularly with regard to Sufism, the occult sciences, and manuscript culture. I also interested in all things linux, occult, scifi, UFO, and anarchist.
You say this machine is headless. Is it at a remote location? If not, is it feasible to connect it to a monitor an keyboard for a few minutes? If so then you could logout, switch DE, and then log back in. That would hopefully set the DE you prefer as user default.
If that’s not possible, then some of the solutions discussed here might be applicable.
I work for a large state university and run linux on my office machine, despite the fact the IT office dept doesn’t officially support it. I told our IT guy once what I’m doing and his response was, “cool.” Of course I’m totally on my own if anything goes wrong. It helps that I’m a prof and most of my on-campus work doesn’t involve much time on a computer, aside from basic web and documents stuff. tldr, in my case I’m able to just do it without asking anyone’s permission, and it’s worked out great for several years now, but a lot of jobs aren’t like that obviously.
I’ve used herbstluftwm on my main desktop for years. Love it. Manual tiling works well for me. Totally flexible and customizable. Switch between floating and tiling with a keypress, etc.
And then on various other machines.
You have to enable it, but once you do it can do them automatically.
Linux Mint Debian Edition. Very windows-like + automatic updates = ideal for people who don’t really want to have to learn anything new (assuming your parents are like mine in that respect).
I’ve been using tmsu for years to manage thousands of pdfs and images for my academic research.
It can be set up to work with a webdav database. So yes, you could self-host the database and access it from clients with local zotero installs.
I’m on it now on arch. TBH it’s kinda making my life harder because some things I’m used to using have moved. I’m sure I’ll see the advantages of it at some point.
That’s impressive even just from a n/vim perspective. Thanks.
The irony is that once you find your way around through the default keys and search a little you soon discover how easy it is to reset them with “sane” settings. Same for window frames, etc. But yes, there’s definitely a learning curve.
endeavourOS
spiral linux
For my research (humanities) I self-host linkding to keep track of web stuff and use tmsu to tag all my local files (pdfs, images, etc). I also use zotero for biblatex/word processor integration. I admit it gets a little clunky working across those systems, but the key for me is keeping the tags consistent across all of them. I guess I’d be interested in an all-in-one solution, but I’m years deep into this setup, so I can’t imagine the effort it would take to transfer everything over.
I write for a living (academic) and have also been keeping personal journals since I first learned to write. For my academic writing I’m all digital, but I always journal by hand. In my experience there are quite very different types of thought and composition involved between the two, and I value them both immeasurably. So now, I don’t think paper is ever going away.
Digital is also shitty for long-term text storage, frankly. Data formats change constantly, software to read stuff changes constantly, disks go bad, the power goes out, and so on. The only thing that comes close to rivaling the durability/reliability of paper kept in a dry dark place and free of bookworms is clay tablets, and they’re a real hassle to make and lug around. Archivists know that if you really need to preserve a text you print it on paper and store it appropriately.
But isn’t that every linux forum?