return to stability, part 2

date: mar 22nd 2026

right, where was i? i went on a whole tangent about my complicated relationship with task management apps, but as i wrote that i realized just how much of my life's details i was misremembering and how they were a bandaid solution to a much bigger problem.

at first i thought i only began fucking up my sleep schedule when the maliszewski movie teaser dropped, cuz i'd spend hours upon hours awake just to yap about my favorite player on tumblr while also making a new gimmick account to ship him with mrekk. and even after the video released on the 28th at midnight & i had spent 6 hours straight just watching the video and taking notes, i still wouldn't go back to a normal sleep schedule because i'd be doing other shit like installing linux, maintaining my neocities website, rewatching & taking even more notes on the maliszewski movie, etc.

really it was the "why sleep when you can stay awake" philosophy i had been reinforcing for months coming into full effect. i genuinely thought that going to sleep at 1-3 am and waking up at anywhere between 9 am and 12 pm was a healthy sleep schedule, so i only started thinking "oh my god my sleep schedule is so cooked" when it stopped existing. there were days where i'd go to sleep and wake up at a normal time, but then i'd spend like 27 hours awake and sleep at 8 am or something.

but all that is in the past now, and by "past" i mean 4-5 days ago. i have such a bad habit of constantly expecting the worst of myself & praying on my downfall so i have to keep going to bed at a healthy schedule to prove myself wrong.

now we can finally talk about the other reasons i prefer staying on windows over linux. let's ignore for now that i'm in the middle of downloading 1.5 tebibytes' worth of music so i have to keep my windows session up 24/7 if i want to finish downloading it as soon as possible – i only started that while in the middle of writing yesterday's blog entry when i realized my windows drive had more than enough space to hoard unfathomable amounts of music.

the biggest thing i want to get into (but couldn't yesterday) is the browser. when i installed atlasos for the 4th time in my entire life, i went with librewolf as my default browser of choice. that's been my default ever since my very first atlas install, but usually i'd end up switching to another browser. originally i'd pick librewolf during the atlasos setup then switch to ungoogled chromium because i wanted to use chrome extensions without having to deal with google's telemetry. then i found out about zen browser.

i love zen browser because it's the first browser i used that has vertical tab displays by default (i didn't realize this applies to every firefox browser until probably a year later) and the plethora of mods tickled the tinkerer part of my brain that had previously been satisfied with rainmeter & wallpaper engine. to make a long story short, i had fun customizing it with mods until i found out about transparent zen, which firmly cemented its place as my favorite browser of all time.

so of course, when i started daily driving linux, one of the first things i did was replace firefox with zen browser. and of course, i made the deliberate choice to stick to librewolf on my windows setup to make the windows experience as boring as possible. except now i'm beginning to realize that all the fun shit i installed on zen might actually be making me less productive overall.

i like having a hyper-minimalist browser setup with a single compact sidebar tucked away to the side, only popping out when i hover over it, youtube video in full focus, no comments no side recommendations no nothing. but just because i like it doesn't mean it's good for me, right? usually what ends up happening is that i watch some productivity videos or art tutorials at 2x speed – y'know, optimization and all that – then forget about them all an hour later while realizing that i just spent all that time watching videos that i got no real insight or enjoyment out of.

i'm not here to pitch an "abandon your phone, return to analog" campaign. first of all, i'm spending way more time on my computer than my phone these days, even if i did, in fact, follow those youtube videos' advice by turning my phone grayscale and only keeping a handful of essential apps plus a youtube wrapper, though i like to think my decreased phone usage came from a change in mentality rather than some surface-level fixes.

second of all, the analog trend is centered around first-world countries (shocker), and while vietnam does still have vinyl and cd and mp3 players and whatnot, 99% of them are way out of my family budget so i can't exactly do things like buying a record player or a physical camera until i get a real job that pays well enough for me to splurge on such things – and i don't even do that much photo-taking or music listening to begin with. how exactly am i supposed to go offline when 90% of my entertainment comes from online services? should i download youtube videos and get into self-hosting (though i guess i'm already kinda doing that with twitch vods, aren't i)?

intermission: a trip to the mall

so while i was in the middle of writing that previous paragraph my family and i decided to go to the hanoi centre (sic). we bought a cup of boba tea & a new book for me, then i moved to a different cafe from where i am currently writing my blog. i'm also writing on my linux-only laptop but i'll explain why this whole procrastination thing is mostly a pc problem for me. also the ac is so fucking cold but idk where else to go cuz this place is insanely crowded today. anyways let's get back to the point.

so what was all that rambling about? the point i was trying to get to is that i think whenever i open up zen browser on my pc i'm way more prone to wasting my time on random youtube videos and other shit because that's what i had been using it for for the longest time. i could try to do work on it but then i'd find myself wandering back to time wasters cuz "zen on pc = no think fun time" in my brain. so really it's not the browser's fault, it's just the environmental conditioning (or whatever it's called) that i've created for myself.

admittedly, in my first few days of using librewolf, i did find myself binging youtube videos like i do on zen browser. but then one day, while i was watching ciel's video "go live a life you're actually interested in" i had a lightbulb moment for myself: i should try taking notes after watching a video. i did exactly that and it was really fun, and now i can't bring myself to click on another video unless i'm fully intent on writing down another set of notes after watching it. but when i booted to linux i still felt the compulsion to mass open & binge videos, so instead i put everything i came across into my "watch later" playlist where they are destined to rot for eternity.

but that's still a me problem, isn't it? ok, fine: the real reason i prefer using librewolf over zen is that zen's uber stylish design created a new problem. this very website, for whatever reason, looks like shit on zen.

and this is after i turned off all the damn extensions and custom mods and all the transparency settings! this is just how zen renders my goddamn website and i fucking hate it. it doesn't happen with librewolf or vanilla firefox so this must have something to do with zen browser itself, but i don't know what it is exactly nor how to fix it, nor do i think that anyone else on the internet has run into this exact problem and gotten annoyed enough by it to hack together a solution somehow, so i just have to deal with it basically.

intermission 2: i'm getting somewhere with this i promise

ok so i just moved to a crepe shop a floor above where i was. it's way quieter here and there isn't a giant ac blasting behind me.

i just spent god knows how long ranting about zen only to realize that this too is also a symptom of a bigger problem that has nothing to do with what i was originally ranting about. yeah sure, i could just get rid of zen and install vivaldi or helium or librewolf or whatever, but the real issue here is that i'm treating linux as a fun time hobby horse yet i also expect myself to daily drive it somehow. those two things do not mesh together, so no wonder i find myself using windows more often when i'm trying to do serious work (i.e. anything that isn't mindless web surfing or playing games).

but here's a genuine complaint about something that works on windows but not on linux: wallpaper engine. no, linux wallpaper engine doesn't work – i've tried but it either only plays audio without changing the wallpaper, or it just straight up crashes. maybe it has something to do with me using hyprland but all this troubleshooting i've had to do just to make something barely work on linux is genuinely wearing me thin. and either way, it's not like i'm using a vanilla windows 11 build with all the telemetry and ai bullshit, so what reasons are there for me to use linux on my pc other than playing osu?

so i guess in conclusion, the more things change, the more they stay the same. the more i try to get myself to use linux, the more i come to realize just how accustomed i am to the windows workflow. i don't really mind having 6-7 windows open so long as they don't force one to shrink just to accomodate for the other & wallpaper engine is running in the background (see, i'm not one of those "music addiction" people. i still like a little bit of constant stimulation).

"oh but why don't you use a windows-like wm/de then" because i'm a stubborn piece of shit who's had enough of their own trendhopping. also it doesn't solve the fundamental problem of all the programs i need to use not working on linux.

i will say though, hyprland caelestia has been really fun to use on laptop. i like the special workspace system it has far more than niri's scrolling window tiles where i'd have to move certain windows to another workspace because you can't hide anything to tray, but true to my nature i'm still trying to make that work somehow. maybe in a month's time i'll slowly develop a more nuanced understanding of what i like and dislike about linux.