I am using Lazygit myself while waiting for GitUI to implement GPG signing, but I can give you my reasons why I use TUI for Git every day. I am doing quite a lot of Git operations regularly, including some interactive rebases, stashing, merging, code reviewing and testing, occasionally some wild cherry-picks etc.
My workflow looks something like the following. I am coding something while I have Lazygit permanently opened on my second monitor to see the overview of the current changes and where I am in the branches at which commit. When I see there have been enough changes, or when I have finished some feature I have been working on, I switch to Lazygit to make multiple commits from the changes. I require a high-level overview of the changes I have made so that I can pick changes by their type (fixes, new feature, …) to be able to decide how am I going to split them. Preferably commit each changes separately, possibly into several branches (fixes to quick fixes branch to merge to master ASAP, new feature to new feature branch). Then I make some rebasing on the current remote branches, push and continue, maybe switch to another branch to check someone’s new code and so on.
Well, exactly as you said, this could all be done in a terminal. I have a multitude of aliases set for many of these operations to make it even quicker. Only I have found out that the ability to have an overview of where I am currently at, what I am about to do and what will happen when I do this is so much comfortable for me. I am making fewer mistakes, like forgetting to include something in the commit. And adding some additional changes to earlier commits while being sure I have not amended the wrong changes to the commit is so convenient I am not sure if I will ever want to switch back to using just CLI.
Considering I have many shell aliases for commonly used Git commands, I think of TUIs for Git as only better visualized and actually much quicker aliases for the same commands. I do not need to write some aliases and execute these commands while constantly making sure with git status or git log and others that I have everything just the way I want it to be and that I have not made any mistakes in the process. I only press a single key. Furthermore, I see what has changed immediately and can act on it at once. For that reason, I actually never need to use these commands to check the current status of the Git repo which do not make any changes themselves. I can simply see that all the time, never having to stop actually making changes, which is pretty amazing to me. One could argue that I am just too inexperienced to fully appreciate the Git CLI workflow, sure, but that does not mean Git TUIs have something I value highly and which works for me splendidly.
I have never seen or used ZorinOS, but I have used Linux Mint for about a year as my daily driver when I started using Linux. What I can say from experience, you cannot go wrong with Linux Mint, in my opinion. I am not saying ZorinOS is not better, but Linux Mint would be definitely a good choice. Cinnamon desktop environment (Linux Mint own DE) provides a good user experience out of the box with enough customizability to satisfy users needs, I would say. Either way, have fun with Linux.
I just skimmed through the content and read a bit. The website looks super neat and useful. Furthermore, the design is beautifully made and the flow of actions feels natural. Amazing work, as far as I can say so far. Excuse me, I am going to sift through some of your recommendations to see what services and SW you have there.
My nickname at grammar school was literally “The Hamster” if you would translate it to English. Apparently, I reminded one of my classmates of their hamster because I usually ate some greens for breakfast. I liked it and it just stuck. Everyone, including some teachers, called me that. My former classmates still do. I have found this one picture after searching for hamster images and I am using it ever since. However, one animal loving friend of mine told me he thinks the rodent in the image is actually a gerbil instead of a winter white dwarf hamster (Djungarian hamster), which it was supposed to be. Ah, well, who knows. I have been happy with the avatar and have no intend to go looking for another hamster avatar.
To add to the Gigablast mention, they teamed up with freenode to create private.sh search engine… Well, I do not know whether they mean the former freenode (nowadays Libera.Chat), or the new one (the freenode after that debacle with the takeover of freenode). If the latter is the case, well, I would say stay miles away from it. And considering I have not seen any mentions of it anywhere, I would be marginally cautious. It might be all all right, but who knows.
From private.sh How it works site:
Built to be audited
Rather than relying solely on closed technologies, we’ve made a genuine effort to publish our code and to use well known and thoroughly tested open solutions to provide a truly private search experience.
Our website and extension is built with open source technologies and can easily be audited and improved through our open source program (coming soon!).
Well, I do not know, but I have not been able to find the source code, so as far I can tell so far, I cannot believe them.
Whoogle seems to get blocked very often for me, both selfhosted and public.
It seems to be the same for me. I used to get timeouts or other errors when testing it. And as far as I can say, it lacks a lot of features I find necessary nowadays (advanced filtering, options etc.). And yeah, if possible, I try to stay away from Google results, or at least mix them with others. Thinking about it, I would be up to remove Whoogle in favour of Startpage.
I actually really liked Brave Search for their results mixed with their own indexing. I have no idea how good Brave Search is privacy-wise (it will not be such a win, I can think), but the results are definitely nice in my opinion.
Qwant
Furthermore, I find myself quite enjoying Qwant in general. The results are good, and the functionality is ample. What I really hate about Qwant is that it is not OSS. Qwant being a European (French) company with respectable reviews (there is always something, of course, but I do not recall that much of a controversy about Qwant) gives it some credibility in my eyes (although, credibility might be a bit too strong of a term). I trust them to some degree, though, for sure. And I used to search Qwant exclusively when I could not find something (especially for national searches) at SearX quickly enough. It worked surprisingly well for me.
The same goes for Startpage (European roots from the Netherlands), for example, but to be honest, If I have to choose between Qwant and Startpage, I would probably go for Qwant. But I did not test Startpage on its own that much, to be honest. It might just be much better than Qwant for all I know. I think I might give it a try for some time…
From my perspective, I would keep Qwant and treat it the same as Startpage, for example. I do not see that much of a difference between these two. I would highly appreciate if anyone here knows more about Startpage or Qwant and point me to some privacy-oriented facts considering these search engines. It would be great to learn more. All I know is just what I have been able to pick up here and there. I lack deeper insight into all of this, sadly.
I personally use SearX as my primary search engine (one local instance, the default searx.be instance as a fallback). Sometimes, I use one of the following search engines as well, but generally, there is no need for them in my case (for some of them, I retrieve their results with my SearX search, anyway). I rarely get to the point where SearX cannot provide the required and satisfactory results and I have to search with some specific search engine. The search engines I currently have set up in all of my browsers on both desktops and mobile phones are:
- SearX,
- DuckDuckGo,
- StartPage,
- Qwant,
- Metager and
- some specific search shortcuts for a few websites (Wikipedia, Lemmy, …).
I have one Whoogle instance set up too, just for testing purposes, though. And I love the idea of per website aggregated results provided by Gigablast, but Gigablast is way too slow to use regularly. Interesting idea, though.
Beautifully explained. Exactly my point of view.