Right. These forums and the IRC channels are really helpful. You can do
everything on Parabola that you can do on Trisquel. The main difference is
after you install it, you literally just have a terminal. So you have to do
everything "by hand" like creating user, installing your DE if you want that,
setting up the internet connection (there's no network manager installed at
the beginning). So if you use some kind of program to get the RSS feeds, you
just install that and you can use it just like on Trisquel. I mean they are
both Linux afterall so they are not really *that* different in terms of how
you use them day to day. The Parabola IRC chat is also really really
friendly. It's way more welcoming than the Arch community imo. Nonetheless
you should expect it to be pretty time consuming at first.
I'm a PhD student and I don't have a whole lot of free time. Sometimes you
have to pick your battles. There are a lot of things I would love to try:
learning to use VIM, learning Haskell, learning to use a different window
manager like Xmonad or something like that, and I'm even really interested in
learning about actually building circuits and things like that. For example,
there are these tiny computers, Sony vaio something or other, and they are
really cute and have a 3g modem. The problem is they were built in like
2009/2010 and they have terrible battery life. But I don't get why we can't
just wire in a modern cell phone battery that has like twice the capacity.
I'd like to get into experimenting with things like that.
But I put it on hold because I have to finish my degree. I guess what I'm
trying to say is, it helps to have a goal in mind when you're trying to learn
something. For me it was trying to get rid of non free software in my life
entirely because, among other things, it's distracting, and I was trying to
make using my computer sort of like an extension of my brain. I think I have
gotten really close actually. But a big part of that is making things
automatic and convenient in ways specific to me and how I use my computer.
