Desktop Linux for Everyone
Firefox has gotten much better; especially in terms of memory usage. I switched to it at work on Windows and haven’t looked back. But the reason I was open to revisiting Firefox was a desire to want to escape Chrome. And I spent my first few hours with Firefox making it behave like Chrome, which wasn’t hard at all.
So yeah. Try Firefox because it’s not Chrome but stay with it because it’s good.
Firefox at 15: its rise, fall, and privacy-first renaissance | Fast Company
This is a post from David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, about switching to Windows from Apple, mostly because of not loving the new MacBook keyboards.
He reports that Windows didn’t work for him either and it made me wonder where Linux fit into his math. Over in the comments, Hansson says he’s open to trying it.
Based on his issues with Apple and Windows, I suspect Linux will be a great fit.
Back to windows after twenty years | Signal v. Noise
This is a very thoughtful essay about how so much of our technology is access and not ownership. It’s sort of a mainframe model, where we’re using terminals to connect, but there’s nothing local for us.
Of course, I say us, but I try to own my technology. I’m not an ebook person. I use Netflix, but I buy DVDs of things I love. And while my CD collection is constantly shrinking, I at least buy MP3s (rather than streaming). So there are choices to be made in terms of what we actually own.
Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours | alexdanco.com
Akash reached out to me through the contact form, and I’m very grateful! Akash is a distro-hopper, which I respect. I very rarely change distros now. I wouldn’t mind if Ubuntu went to a ten-year long-term support cycle. Things run so well now, I never feel the need to change, where a while back, sometimes it felt easier to start over with a new distribution. I hope I haven’t jinxed myself!
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.
I’m an avid Linux user who ditched Windows for some unknown reason, trying to make my life fully compatible with free and open source software. I’m a distro-hopper, a hardware enthusiast, blogger, and, in my leisure time, a console gamer. I was introduced to Linux back in mid-2008 by a school friend. I’m a senior support networking specialist currently working on the outskirts of Navi Mumbai, India.
Why do you use Linux?
I’ve been primarily using Linux on the desktop for 11 years, starting the day I was introduced to a shiny new desktop in those old, golden days. I started with Gentoo Linux; it immediately stole my heart and I fell in love with it almost instantly. I started using Linux as my primary machine. I also tried Ubuntu 9.04 on my aging hardware. I had no clue about using the terminal, and just stuck to the graphical interface, but I kept Gentoo as a secondary boot option under GRUB.
I would classify myself as a Linux pragmatist, rather than a Linux idealist. I use Linux because the workflow and speed better suit my needs. I still believe that *nix is simple and it takes a genius to understand its simplicity. I love the flexibility that the operating system provides. The community, openness, and lack of malware is a bonus, plus all the bells and whistles that a distribution can throw at you, for free of course. 🙂
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
Fedora 31 is on my desktop and Peppermint 10 on my laptop. However there are a few other operating systems which I keep in my arsenal for my testing as I prefer installing them and dual or multi-booting them, rather than taking them for a VM spin. Parrot, Mint, Lubuntu, Bodhi, and Q4OS (based on Debian Stable) do come to the party, as I’m a distro-hopping freak!
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
Initially I was a GNOME 2 fanatic, because of its simplicity and snappiness. But I’m now happy and settled with GNOME 3, as there is vast amount of community support, big names in the game are funding it, and it seems to be rock solid, with performance-enhancements and tweaks rolling over into every release.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
I cannot live without a GUI-based text editor and IDE. I’m not much of a command-line user in terms of getting my day-to-day work done. So gedit, Geany IDE and Sublime Text are favorites. Apart from these, I use Shutter and GIMP for graphics, and mostly the default GNOME screen capture tool for daily chores. Also, I use the terminal for system maintenance, and casually use the htop tool, as well as its GUI counterpart.
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
I use a Lenovo B490 laptop at work. It is equipped with an Intel Core i3-3310 processor, and a 240GB Kingston SSD. This laptop is great for day-to-day work, like surfing the Internet, blogging, and a little bit of photo editing and video editing too. Although not a professional laptop, and the specs not being that high end, it does the job perfectly.
I use a Logitech basic wireless mouse and would like to eventually get a mechanical keyboard. My custom-built desktop has the latest 7th-generation Intel i5 7400 processor, and 8GB Corsair Vengeance RAM. It’s not overkill but allows the daily chores to be easily done. I have been using this machine for a few years now.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure, here is one from Ubuntu 19.10, which I’m logged into right now, using the default terminal app, as seen in GNOME.
Interview conducted November 7, 2019
The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.
You can follow me on Mastodon here, follow me on Twitter here and subscribe to the feed here.
To be fair, Google moved some of these services into other services, so they’re not really dead.
But seriously. Be leery of the Google ecosystem. It’s like the last 20 minutes of a slasher film.
This is a solid article about switching to Linux, but I love the quote Kev mentions, from Michael Hermann, about using Linux:
macOS is like a hotel. Everything is polished, designed and cared for. But it’s also sterile and you can’t bring your own furniture or cook your own food. On Ubuntu / Linux, you need to do the dishes and take out the trash yourself. But it’s yours. No one forces their agenda on you. It simply feels like home.
Going from macOS to Ubuntu | kvz.io
It’s a familiar problem: open-source software is widely acknowledged as crucially important in science, yet it is funded non-sustainably. Support work is often handled ad hoc by overworked graduate students and postdocs, and can lead to burnout.
This is a great article, found via Scott Nesbitt’s fantastic Monday Kickoff newsletter.
Open-source work is work. People depend upon it, yet it’s not in many institutions’ budgets. I work in a large public university system and I’m fairly certain there’s no way for us to contribute money to an unaffiliated open source project.
The article gets into all of this and it’s worth a read because a lot of people are suffering while this challenge isn’t being solved.
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Scott Nesbitt for his Eight Questions series on The Plain Text Project.
I obviously love talking plain text, so I had a blast. And Scott’s site has lots of great links, interviews, and commentary.
Eight Questions for Steven Ovadia | The Plain Text Project
I love that Sam works for OMG! Ubuntu! but uses Arch. It’s almost like a romantic comedy, although without the romance or the comedy. Regardless, I’m currently using it as the premise for my Meg Ryan comeback script. Sam’s reasons for using Linux should be familiar to all of us: the ability to see why things aren’t working and to customize your desktop experience. I also like that Sam uses the term joy when discussing Linux. Linux is fun to use and to play with. You’re getting things done and you’re learning things and it makes for an enjoyable, fulfilling experience.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.
Hi, I’m Sam! I’m a senior software engineer at NBC News where I work on editorial tools for our digital editors on the NBC News, MSNBC, and TODAY websites. I’m also the developer at OMG! Ubuntu!, working on themes, plugins, and the occasional article, over the last seven years.
Why do you use Linux?
I feel much more productive when I’m working on personal and professional projects on Linux and I have a lot of fun while I do it. All of my tools for web and desktop development feel at home on the Linux desktop more than any other platform. I’ve used macOS most of my professional career, but every release leaves me less optimistic about its future as a usable development environment. Windows Subsystem for Linux has been an interesting experiment on Windows as well, but I never feel particularly comfortable with the rest of the system.
I also enjoy being able to try out different desktop environments, themes, toolkits, and whatever else seems interesting to play around with. I’ve found perfect setups in very different environments over the years and I love being able to quickly switch between desktops and mix-and-match pieces from different parts of the Linux ecosystem without too many issues.
It’s not a perfect experience by any means, but knowing I can peek under the hood when things go wrong and that there’s a vast free and open source community creating tools for everyone to use brings me a lot of joy that no other operating system has matched.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I run Arch on my desktop. I discovered Arch, ironically, during my early work on OMG! Ubuntu! and immediately fell in love with the Arch Wiki, the extensive Arch User Repository, and the surprising stability of an always up-to-date rolling release distribution. I run Ubuntu and Debian on servers around the apartment, but I’ve used Arch almost exclusively for Linux desktops since 2014.
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
I’m currently using GNOME. I play around with other desktop environments when I get the chance though. I like the overall cohesion of my current GNOME desktop and the quality of the themes, but I had a great time with awesomeWM a few years ago and I’d love to get used to tiling window managers again, and switch to Sway full time.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
Probably htop. It’s the one thing I install anywhere I possibly can: desktops, servers, networking equipment, anything that blinks and inexplicably runs Debian. I’m a sucker for system monitoring with lots of pretty colors and htop is happy to provide it on top of easy sorting and process killing.
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
I recently built my first workstation in over a decade. I used a 24-core AMD CPU with a Radeon VII GPU. It’s a little overkill for casual work, but it’s been great for compiling larger projects and playing around with Blender on the side. It’s also my first AMD hardware and I really enjoy being able to use open source graphics drivers without sacrificing performance.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure! My desktop is usually just a grid of editors, browser windows, and terminals, but it’s nice being able to see my Firewatch-themed wallpaper every once in awhile.
Interview conducted October 19, 2019
The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.
You can follow me on Mastodon here, follow me on Twitter here and subscribe to the feed here.
I love how aggressively GNOME is fighting this:
“We want to send a message to all software patent trolls out there — we will fight your suit, we will win, and we will have your patent invalidated. ”
GNOME has established a patent troll defense fund, too. It’s sad that money has to go toward this, rather than toward working on their actual product. But that’s life in 2019.
