I’ve officially been using Fedora for a month on Tachyon and I have enough changes made that I think it’s time for me to do a progress post.

At a glance, I’m using:

  • Alacritty as my terminal emulator.
    • Bash as my shell.
    • Starship for my prompt.
    • Tmux as default.
  • Dunst for desktop notifications.
  • i3 as my WM.
  • Picom as my compositor.
  • Rofi as my app/script launcher.
  • Polybar as my bar.
  • Catppuccin Mocha as my theme for everything.
  • I use both NVIM and VSCode for my editors.
  • auto-cpufreq to increase my battery life. The details of what I’m using right now can be found in my dotfiles repo.

Things I needed to address:

  • Setting up “battery” and “power” modes using a script to change things like keyboard brightness, screen brightness, refresh rate, and GPU mode.
  • Pulseaudio as an audio solution instead of pipewire (issues with WH-1000XM4’s).
  • Create desktop entries for appimages in order for them to show up in Rofi (ex. Obsidian).

Things I’ve noticed:

  • Battery Life: I was expecting it to be poor, but as it turns out, it isn’t much worse than Windows. With the battery starting at 80%, I can get around 7.5-8 hours of regular use (basically anything except watching videos) where on Windows I could have gotten 8-9.
    • Videos drain the battery almost twice as fast. I assume this is because of videos codecs, but at the moment I’m not bothered enough to fix it.