gfle

I did! Don’t expect too much stability out of it, but I was surprised to say that the latest version worked pretty stable and nicely for me. I can definitely recommend it.

Unpopular opinion: non-pro can handle the OS just fine and then some. Try out SailfishOS (unfortunately not OSS) - it’s as smooth as butter. Or UBPorts - it works great (unfortunately both Sailfish and UBPorts aren’t as polished when it comes to actual hardware support on PinePhone, but they show nicely what could be done). I don’t think I even need to mention Sxmo, which is no surprise that it works great, but its approach is definitely not for everyone.

It’s just Gnome/Plasma that are mainly developed for “big” computers and are pretty wasteful. But the situation is definitely improving.

Vim/Emacs/… starter kits achieve the same experience.

Which Vim/Emacs/… starter kit sets up the same keyboard navigation model as Helix uses? I think that it’s its main strength, the selection -> action approach, which is quite intuitive (at least for me once I’ve tried) is what really matters in Helix. The rest is just an addition, the one that makes it a quite competent and convenient environment to work with, but an addition.

Not if you’re willing to flash your own firmware, what is often possible: https://tasmota.github.io/docs/ (and others)

Most of the time it requires opening the switch and connecting to the serial port that’s inside more or less exposed. Nothing especially difficult, but can be a little intimidating at first. It’s not easy to fail, though, and those switches are so cheap that even if you manage to break it somehow then the loss is not great.

• ranger and mc - both are file managers, and their approach is so different that I choose one of them I need at the moment depending on what do I want to do (mc for traditional file management, ranger for looking around the directory tree and peeking into files)
• htop, tmux - classics
• weechat, profanity - for my IM needs
• ripgrep - for searching through files
• magic-wormhole for file and ssh public key exchange
• mosh for when the network conditions aren’t ideal
• nmap to see if that machine I’ve connected into the network is up and what IP did it get
• bat for quick looking into files
• gdb, with mandatory gdb dashboard
• nvim for serious text and code editing, micro for more casual editing