Oooh! I’ve been waiting for someone to try to replace LaTeX.

I used Zotero all through uni, but I’ve recently discovered JabRef. Zotero probably has more features and polish, but JabRef has one killer feature: Your plaintext BibLaTeX file is your reference database. So you can version control and collaborate on your reference file with git. No export required.

But how do you authenticate to your secret manager? How do you prevent evil scripts from also doing this?

• OpenTyrian (likely available in your package manager)

Depends what you’re trying to learn, and how much of a beginner you are. If you want to learn the shell, try the Software Carpentry tutorials:

• The Unix Shell - Software Carpentry
• Version Control with Git

If you know the basics, you might try honing your skills with CLI Mystery (murder mystery puzzle).

You’ll probably want to learn how to use the following:

• SSH
• Command-line text editor. Choose one of the following:
  • Nano <- Smallest learning curve
  • Vim (or Neovim) <- My favourite (See Mastering the Vim Language)
  • Emacs <- Some people like it

The final tip is: It’s usually better in the long run to spend 2 hours reading the documentation than 2 minutes searching the web. Reading the documentation helps you to understand the big picture, and gives you a much better foundation. Of course, if you’re reading the documentation and don’t understand something, searching the web is an OK way to figure it out.

I mainly use Python, so my workflow is the same on every OS: Neovim and a shell, usually one of each in a vertical split. This transfers nicely to remote SSH sessions too, and even works in Termux on my phone!

Have you investigated whether it’s possible to test your cross-compiled builds in Qemu, rather than copying them to the host?

I think they said in the release article that they were going to roll 115 out slowly because it’s such a big change.

What are your hobbies? Most people struggle to learn programming until they find a project that they are interested in. You mentioned an interest in music. Perhaps you could try Sonic Pi, which is a live coding environment where you can create music from code. It comes with a built-in tutorial, and a bunch of pre-written example code-music. It’s built with the ruby language.

My 3 year old daughter has a 2010 MacBook running AntiX. She knows how to boot it, press Enter on the dual-boot screen, and is getting close to being able to select Stardew Valley from the app menu. She also enjoys playing GCompris.