Many Linux users settle on whatever their desktop environment their distro provides. Then there are others are endlessly tinkering–that was me. However, for the last couple of years, I’ve settled on what I think is a happy middle-ground between the flexibility of a tiling WM like sway and the usability of GNOME or KDE.

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The Dogu Express reaches its penultimate stop, leaving enough time to buy and drink a quick Turkish coffee on the platform.

In November of 2022, I headed to Ankara for a two-week adventure through Turkey and the Caucuses with a friend that I have known for many years. It had been a trip months in the making, though it started with a humble suggestion during a Discord chat one evening. Both being relatively early into our careers, we did not have the luxury of spending money on long-haul flights to the U.S., a week’s worth of hotels in an expensive state as well as the petrol needed to get us around. Nor did the idea of staying in Europe and going to museums sound all that excited to us adventure-seekers. So instead, it was more a question of how far we could go for the least money and luckily, through browsing on Google Flights, we found short-haul flights to Ankara that fit the description well. So our destination had now become Ankara. But ask any Turk and they will tell you that there isn’t much to see in this city. Therefore, we decided to take the night train across the country and continue this journey into the Caucuses, which I’ll probably describe in a further blog post.