1-1sam

What I Use

This page is dedicated to the software and hardware I use.

Primary Desktop

Hardware

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G
• GPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G APU
• Cooler: Be Quiet! Pure Rock Slim 2
• Memory: 16 GB
• Motherboard: B450M PRO-VDH MAX
• Disk 1: Intel 512GB NVMe SSD
• Disk 2: 1TB Samsung SATA SSD 870

Software

• OS: Slackware64 15.0
• Shell: Bash
• Desktop: Xfce4
• Terminal Emulator: xfce4-terminal + tmux
• Text Editor: Vim
• Web Browser: Firefox
• Music Player: Quod Libet
• Image Viewer: Geeqie
• Media Player: mpv

Notes

My motherboard did not originally support the Ryzen 5000 series. I believe you have to update the firmware to at least 7A38vBB for 5000 support.

My NVMe acts as my boot and system drive. It is mounted as my root partition using the ext4 file system. My Samsung acts as my user data drive and it is mounted as my home partition. It is also uses the ext4 file system.

I am currently using Slackware, but I tend to switch between it and Debian.

It took me a while to settle on Quod Libet as my music player of choice. Coming from Windows, my preferred music player was MusicBee which is not available for Linux. The two things I really liked about MusicBee were:

• You could display play your music library as an album cover grid, which I liked because I prefer to listen to my music by album.
• MusicBee has a built-in tag editor that was easy to use.

The first music player I settled on when switching to Linux was musikcube. It was nice but I felt like its UI was a bit awkward to navigate. Someone I knew who was also a fan of MusicBee that used Linux suggested I should try out gmusicbrowser. gmusicbrowser could be configured to use an album cover grid UI similar to MusicBee's and also featured a built-in tag editor, but it had the problem of being difficult to install on many systems. On Slackware, you had to install a huge tree of dependencies from SlackBuilds.org which I did not like as at the time I did not have an efficient system for keeping track of installed SlackBuilds and I also was not aware of the existence of sqg. On Debian, you could not even install gmusicbrowser due to it depending on a lot deprecated Perl stuff. On top of that, it seems that development on gmusicbrowser has come to halt, so these issues are not likely to be resolved in the near future. After gmusicbrowser, I discovered Quod Libet, which was very similar to gmusicbrowser but was actively developed. I also liked Quod Libet's tag editor a bit more. Plus, Quod Libet comes with Debian by default if you use Xfce.

I don't care about my image viewer that much. On Slackware, I use Geeqie because it comes pre-installed. On Debian, I use Ristretto as it comes with the Xfce desktop.