About me

My name is Kacper Kocot, but around the net, I am better known as kocotian. I am 15 years old boy from Poland, and I am interested in low-level computing from software level.

Hardware

I use ThinkPad T420s as my main production machine. It is a great machine in 2021. For me, it have enough and even more power than I need. I plan to get ThinkPad X220 as secondary machine, which I will probably coreboot.

Software

Operating system

I am using Arch Linux (more precisely Artix Linux) with a custom-compiled kernel and my own dwm build as my operating system and window manager of choice. If you are interested in my dwm build, you can look here:

dwm on my git server:

Static webpage: git.kocotian.pl/dwm
Clone with: git clone git://git.kocotian.pl/dwm.git

I also tried Void Linux with musl and it's great distro, but unfortunately, some fonts doesn't work, and my dwm build is broken because compilation with musl sometimes breaks and I could not compile libxft-bgra. Also, I could not compile a kernel. Last thing that is missing for me is AUR. I know that it's impossible to use AUR in Void, because Void doesn't use pacman, and repositories are not compatible.

I used Parabola GNU/Linux-libre for some time on my old Hykker Hello laptop. I didn't have drivers for Wi-Fi and for audio then, and this notebook doesn't have Ethernet (it is a small, thin, 11.6' laptop).
That was a good distro.

Window manager

My window-manager of choice is of course my highly customized build of dwm. Now, I can not imagine life without dwm, even though I didn't want to switch from i3. When I want to give my dwm more features, I just go to patches webpage in suckless.org website and search for it, and if it's not "available", I just code it myself.

As said above, I used i3 for a pretty long time, but i3 is now horrible for me. Why? So...

  1. Performance and memory usage

    dwm tiles windows automatically and dynamically. It means that if a new window appears, dwm will, according to selected layout, move a new window to the master part, and rest of windows will be in a slave part. Windows are on the stack, so you can move them, set window to master, change size of master part, and many other things.
    On the other side, tiling in i3 is manual. It means that you must select where exacly window will be spawned, but that give you flexibility to make your own layout in runtime. This is great, but dynamic tiling is usable more often than manual tiling.

  2. Manual tiling

    dwm tiles windows automatically and dynamically. It means that if a new window appears, dwm will, according to selected layout, move a new window to the master part, and rest of windows will be in a slave part. Windows are on the stack, so you can move them, set window to master, change size of master part, and many other things.
    On the other side, tiling in i3 is manual. It means that you must select where exacly window will be spawned, but that give you flexibility to make your own layout in runtime. This is great, but dynamic tiling is usable more often than manual tiling.


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