The daily driver

The mail order arrived on Monday with the box containing Raspberry Pi 5 + official power adapter, the official active cooler, and a micro-HDMI adapter. Assembly was straightforward. Next up was software.

The Raspberry Pi OS Desktop also comes pre-installed with Chromium browser and Evince document viewer, which are both excellent. I also installed Gimp and considered installing Inkscape.

It’s been running for days now, and needs some ventilation — to prevent increase in board temperature. The portability of this Pi I can get used to. There is also Connect as a service, which is interesting. The backup is as simple as copying the entire volume to an external one via the SD Card Copier, which has no trouble doing it from M.2 SSD to an external SSD either.

It is refreshing to have a simple, usable interface without fluff, walled garden annoyances, with the freedom to setup, install, and have a system that is just sufficient and nothing more.

Custom keyboard shortcuts

There are a bunch of defaults in labwc, which Raspberry Pi OS adopted late last year, and it took me a while to figure this out, and on how to add custom keyboard shortcuts for some basic things like starting an application, e.g., Chromium with, say, CtrlAlt c , and lock screen with, say, CtrlAlt l . (A couple of defaults I use the most is the window snapping to either left, rght, or full screen. These can be done with Meta←, Meta→, or Metaa; where Meta means Win or Cmd.) Add the keyboard section and key binds to $HOME/.config/labwc/rc.xml within the openbox_config open and close tags. (Ensure they do not clash with the defaults.)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<openbox_config xmlns="http://openbox.org/3.4/rc">
<!-- pre-populated defaults here (leave'em alone) -->

<keyboard>

  <!-- Launch Chromium -->
  <keybind key="C-A-c">
    <action name="Execute" command="chromium"/>
  </keybind>

  <!-- Launch File Explorer -->
  <keybind key="W-e">
    <action name="Execute" command="pcmanfm"/>
  </keybind>

  <!-- Lock screen -->
  <keybind key="C-A-l">
    <action name="Execute" command="dm-tool lock"/>
  </keybind>

</keyboard>

</openbox_config>

If this file is edited, then it should be followed-up by running the following for the settings to reload.

labwc --reconfigure

Update (2025-03-15): I heard ATP.fm complaining about the state of MacOS’s UI in their episode this week. So I am not alone in this after all. The excess padding, the oddities of controls, the overzealous security along with a large portion of the little SSD locked-up for system software is all annoying! In contrast, when I fire up Pi, it feels like sanity.

At SCALE 2023, someone asked Ken Thompson what OS does he use today. He said:

I have for most of my life, because I was sort of born into it, run Apple alright? Now recently, meaning within in the last five years, I have become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious but they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it’s OK. And I have come, within the last month or two, to say even though I have invested, you know, zillion years in Apple, I am throwing it away, and I am going to Linux — to Raspbian in particular.