The Linux Setup – John Been, Engineer

February 20, 2019

John’s enthusiasm comes through clearly here. John is an Apple refugee who really appreciates the Linux life. I love all of the photography stuff John handles with Linux. I’m not much of a photo person, but my sense of things is that Linux is handling serious photo work better and better. It’s great to hear that confirmed. And just as a reminder, John contacted me through the web form. If you’d like to be interviewed, please drop me a line. I love hearing from people!

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.

  1. Who are you, and what do you do?

    Hi there! My name is John Been. I live, together with my wife and our cat, in a small city in the north of the Netherlands. In 1997 my wife and I both completed our masters Business Economics at the VU University of Amsterdam, where I specialized in Administrative Information Science, the IT side of business administration. At the moment I work as a senior development engineer for a large financial institution where I am involved in translating requirements into working IT solutions. But in this interview for “The Linux Setup” I will not focus on my professional life, because we hardly use open source software there, although it is getting a bit better. I’d rather focus on using Linux and open source software for my personal projects, my Linux-oriented website www.reallinuxuser.com and the book that I am writing with the working title Linux for Humans. In addition to my interest in everything related to information technology, I am also passionate about landscape photography, writing, drawing, learning, web development, video editing, and integrating this with my interest in Linux and open source software.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    I have not always been a Linux user. I switched to using Linux as my daily driver only a few years ago. Before that I had been a very satisfied user of the OS X (now macOS) operating system for more than 10 years. But due to increasing hardware issues with my iMac, and the fact that my loyal-but-old MacBook was no longer supported by Apple, I looked for something different. I did not want to invest again in a new, inflexible integrated iMac and the Apple ecosystem with correspondingly high prices. And because I felt a bit adventurous at that moment, I decided to build my own Linux workstation. I also replaced OS X on my old-but-technically-still-working MacBook with Linux. Both systems were running Linux Mint and from that moment on I couldn’t have been happier. That migration to Linux on my MacBook and my new workstation opened my eyes for what is possible with Linux and open source software. I experienced the speed, flexibility and stability of Linux. I experienced the fantastic diversity of powerful open source software solutions. I experienced the willingness of the Linux community to help others. And I experienced the new journey of discovery that revived my old passion for computers and software.

  3. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

    I like to have separate systems for different goals. For my serious personal projects, such as my landscape photography, my Linux website, my web design, my study and my book-in-progress for people who just want to be productive with Linux, I prefer stable machines. On these production machines, a custom-build Intel i7 desktop and a Dell Latitude E7450 laptop, I run Linux Mint 19 with the Cinnamon desktop environment. Lots of people in the Linux community say that Linux Mint is good for beginners, but in my opinion it is also great for power users that are less interested in the technology but more in the stability and out-of-the-box experience and that runs their software flawlessly. On the other hand, for creating my articles for my website, I try out lots of open source software solutions and different Linux distributions. Because of this changing of distributions, software and settings can sometimes lead to an unstable or crashing system. For this reason, I prefer to experiment on separate machines. For these experiments I use an old Core 2 Duo Dell Precision T3400 and my previously-described old MacBook, on which I do a lot of distro hopping and installation and removal of software. Currently this Dell precision runs Elementary OS and the MacBook runs Deepin and despite their age they run surprisingly well.

  4. What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?

    It is not possible to choose one single Linux distribution and one single desktop environment that is best for every user. That is why I like it that there are so many different options for different kinds of users and situations. We are all different, so having the freedom to choose is great, but can also make things difficult for beginners. On my website and in my upcoming book I try to distinguish between a number of personas, and see which desktop environment fits them best, like the eye candy lover, the macOS switcher, the Windows switcher, the minimalist, the tweaker and the practical user. For my production machines I consider myself the practical user and I think the Cinnamon desktop is the best fit for that. On these machines I don’t do a lot of tinkering. These machines must help me to be productive and that’s what Linux Mint Cinnamon is doing for me. But on my other machines, I like to try new things and I must say that I like the beauty of the Deepin desktop environment.

  5. What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?

    Landscape photography is my passion. In my Apple days I relied on Adobe Lightroom for my photography workflow. Now as a Linux and open source lover, I don’t have Lightroom at my disposal, but when it comes to image editing under Linux, I am not disappointed. A surprisingly large number of high quality RAW editors are available for Linux, such as RAWTherapee, GTKRAWgallery and Lightzone. But anyone who appreciates a clear and professional workflow for importing, rating, editing, synchronizing, presenting, printing and exporting, can hardly ignore the application Darktable, being color managed, offering a smart and professional setup, and providing an enormous range of high-quality development modules. In my opinion Darktable is a must-have in your serious or professional photography workflow. But for my website and book I use a lot of other tools as well. LibreOffice and GIMP are very important, but the simple-but-feature-rich screenshot application Shutter is indispensable. And my love for the Vivaldi browser is growing.

  6. What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?

    As said before, I have not always been a Linux user. I only started using Linux a few years ago after I had been a very satisfied user of the Apple ecosystem for more than a decade. But due to increasing hardware issues I looked for something different. So I decided to custom build a relatively powerful Core i7 16GB Linux workstation with a simple GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB dedicated graphics card. The system has a 250GB Samsung EVO SSD internal drive for the operating system and internal data drives of 1, 2 and 4TB. Further there is a 3TB external drive for my photos, a RAIDON 2-bay 3TB RAID 1 system for my backups and a Synology DS216J Network Attached Storage Device. I also use a Dell Latitude E7450 Core i5 laptop with 16GB RAM, a Dell Precision T3400 Core 2 Duo workstation with 6GB RAM, and a MacBook Core 2 Duo Late 2008 laptop with 4GB RAM.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Yes of course! Here is my Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop with my favorite application, Darktable, showing one of my landscape photographs created in my favorite country, Iceland.

Interview conducted November 15, 2018

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 Linux Rig on Google+ here, follow me on Twitter here, and subscribe to the feed here.

He Reported on Facebook. Now He Approaches It With Caution.

February 14, 2019

If you could invent a product to help people protect their online privacy, what would it be?

I’m going to answer this one the long way. The United States has no basic consumer privacy law. So every individual has to be in charge of navigating the entire commercial-surveillance-industrial-complex on his or her own. Which is to say, it’s practically impossible for any nonexperts to protect their privacy in a meaningful way.

The privacy expert Ashkan Soltani, whom I’ve quoted in some stories, compares it to ordering a cup of coffee at a Starbucks and being told that the coffee may be loaded with arsenic, but that it’s up to you to figure out whether or not the coffee is safe to drink.

I know I’ve been writing a lot about privacy, but it’s very important. Reporter Nick Confessore has some great takes on the issue.

He Reported on Facebook. Now He Approaches It With Caution | The New York Times

The BSD Setup – Roman Zolotarev, Developer

February 13, 2019

I found out about Roman on Twitter (thank you, Fabio!). Roman runs a BSD version of The Setup (which I think is now called Uses This…). Roman definitely loves the terminal, using just three graphical programs. And, like so many Linux users, he also loves ThinkPads. We’re all not so different after all, are we?

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.

  1. Who are you, and what do you do?

    Hi, I’m Roman Zolotarev. I make software for the web. I started my career as a webmaster in the nineties, then focused on frontend and now on backend.

    I run a job board and write quick how-tos for BSD users. I’m a fan of OpenBSD, shell scripts, vi, ThinkPads, and ErgoDox.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    I used to run Red Hat Linux, then Fedora, and then Ubuntu on my servers, and for few years I ran Linux as my daily driver on ThinkPads. Then I switched to MacBooks for eight years.

    A few years ago I started migrating my servers to OpenBSD and almost a year ago I switched to OpenBSD on all my computers.

    Why BSD? It’s simpler than Linux and macOS. And I like it.

  3. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

    I run OpenBSD -stable on my desktop, laptop, and all my servers. It’s the simplest OS for my needs. It has everything in base: X11, cwm, xterm, tmux, vi, sh.

    Its well-documented man pages are always accurate and concise. You can learn OpenBSD offline. No Googling is required. It also has sane defaults. I feel comfortable and productive on a just-installed system. Zero configuration is required.

  4. What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?

    I use cwm. It’s a window manager from OpenBSD base. cwm is lightweight and has tiling mode.

  5. What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?

    Thank you for this question. Quick answer: the kernel.

    This is really deep.

    Unix’s nature is composability, so if we are talking about userland, then my web development workflow depends upon few dozens of programs from /usr/bin. Let me list them in no particular order: grep, sed, tr, cut, paste, awk, echo, sort, uniq, join, column, fmt, expand, cat, diff, comm, od, vis, uconv, jot, bc, spell.

    I pipe them all day long. Those are my “text editor.”

    I use combinations of /usr/bin programs for everything from managing files, passwords, archives, to you-name-it.

    The complete list of GUI programs I depend on is much shorter: cwm, xterm, and Firefox. Right. Just three.

  6. What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?

    My default workstation is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. It’s docked most of the time, so I can use it with a 24″ display and my favorite keyboard. The keyboard is ErgoDox EZ and that’s the only irreplaceable piece of hardware. 🙂 Learn more here.

    I run my OpenBSD servers on Vultr and OpenBSD Amsterdam

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    It’s cwm, xterm, tmux, vi, and Firefox.

Interview conducted August 13, 2018

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 Linux Rig on Google+ here, follow me on Twitter here, and subscribe to the feed here.

Is Privacy a Right?

February 12, 2019

Doc Searls has a very interesting article around the idea of what a right actually is and what the term can mean.

In general, I like to think of rights as something we assert rather than something granted to us. So our right to privacy isn’t given to us by companies. We need to proactively grant ourselves the right. That could mean by not engaging with companies that don’t respect our privacy. That could mean by only contracting with companies that respect our privacy. The point is, we can’t count on anyone but ourselves to protect our rights. Facebook won’t save us from Facebook.

Is Privacy a Right? | Linux Journal

The Rise and Demise of RSS

February 7, 2019

This is a brief history of RSS, which I love. Like many, I wish RSS had caught on. However, I’m not sure it’s the answer to the problems of filter bubbles. Despite that caveat, I think it’s way better than social media, which is controlled by algorithms only a select few understand.

RSS is still around and I think with the right client or web tool, it could make a come-back. I’m not ready to give up. It’s just too convenient a way to get the information you want pushed to you.

The Rise and Demise of RSS | Motherboard

The Linux Setup – Kev Quirk, Cyber Security

February 6, 2019

Kev uses the phrase “Linux pragmatist” as a shorthand for people who like Linux as a tool, but are perhaps less interested in the politics of free and open source software. I often wonder where I fit in on that scale. I love the openness of Linux, but I use it because it works so well for me. I love the philosophy of Linux but it’s also an amazing piece of technology. I suppose Kev’s point is that Linux works on a few levels.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.

  1. Who are you, and what do you do?

    My name is Kev Quirk and I am a cyber security professional from the UK. I’m currently working as a Cyber Security Incident Response Lead for a global financial institution. Aside from this, I’m a lover of animals, motorbikes and of course, Linux/FOSS.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    I’ve been using Linux for around 10 years now. The first distro I installed was Ubuntu 08.04 Hardy Heron. I originally started using Linux out of nothing more than interest. I was pretty good with Windows, and was working as a Windows server admin at the time, so I wanted to learn something new. It was only later that a lot of the advantages of open source became clear—when I first started, I didn’t even know what free and open source software was.

    I would class myself as a Linux pragmatist, rather than a Linux idealist. I use Linux because the workflow better suits my needs. I love the flexibility that the OS provides. The community, openness and lack of malware is a bonus. 🙂

  3. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

    I’m currently running Ubuntu MATE 18.04.

  4. What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?

    I’ve always loved the GNOME 2 workflow, so when GNOME went to version 3, I lost my way a little. From there I tried Unity, Cinnamon, Xfce, Elementary, Budgie, and many more. None really worked for me, so I actually went back to Windows for a while. I did try MATE, but I initially felt it wasn’t a mature product. I did always keep a Linux partition on my machines, but Windows tended to be my go-to OS for a period of time.

    Anyway, fast forward a couple of years and I replaced Windows 10 with Ubuntu MATE 16.04 and never looked back. It was perfect. So I’ve been blissfully using Ubuntu MATE ever since.

  5. What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?

    I conciously try not to be dependant on one particular piece of software, but if I had to pick, I’d say Firefox. Most things can be accomplished in a good web browser these days. Webmail, no problem. For document editing you can use Zoho docs, or Google if you’re inclined that way (although LibreOffice is my preference if it’s available).

    Aside from Firefox, I would say the applications I use the most would be a text editor (in my case Pluma), the terminal, and Inkscape/GIMP (I enjoy graphic design as a hobby). My needs are pretty simple, which allows me to have a lot of freedom over which distro/OS I use. Although, I’m not much of a distro-hopper these days.

  6. What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?

    I have two main machines. My laptop (which is my daily driver) is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. It’s an awesome bit of kit that works superbly well with Linux. It’s a Core i7 with 8GB RAM, Intel 4400 GPU and a 256GB SSD.

    My desktop is a custom-built jobby that I tend to use more for graphical stuff, as it has my WACOM tablet plugged in to it. That machine has an AMD FX-6300, a Radeon RX 560, 16GB RAM, a 128GB SSD for my OS and a 1TB HDD for data. It’s no powerhouse by modern standards, but it’s great for my needs.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Sure. Attached is a screenshot from my ThinkPad (my desktop UI is exactly the same). It’s Ubuntu MATE 18.04 with the Apapta GTK theme, Papirus icon theme and a Plank dock. The background image is my own little homage to the man himself: Linus Torvalds.

Interview conducted July 31, 2018; desktop screenshot updated February 7, 2019, at request of subject

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 Linux Rig on Google+ here, follow me on Twitter here, and subscribe to the feed here.

The Linux Setup – Alois Mahdal, Red Hat

January 30, 2019

Alois has a great setup. I’m especially intrigued by the deployment of config files. Tweaking a fresh install is easier and easier, but there are still things that need to be set-up manually. Things like your Git files. Being able to pull everything down seems to make things super easy. I also very much share Alois’ affection for the ThinkPad TrackPoint. I’m pretty much useless on any laptop without one. I don’t know why more people don’t love them like we do.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.

  1. Who are you, and what do you do?

    My name is Alois Mahdal, and I’m enthusiastic about free/libre/open culture. I love coding, and my favorite types of software are tests and development tools. I don’t call myself hacker because that would be awkward—that word is a compliment (obviously the original sense, not the “bad guy who stole your grandma’s credit card” sense).

    I’m currently working as Quality Assurance Engineer at Red Hat. About 50% of that is investigating bugs (in own or others’ code); the rest is writing tests (mostly in Bash) and developing tools to help with automation.

    When I’m not coding or torturing some poor machine, I love listening to podcasts, watching educational videos on YouTube, reading graphic novels, exploring new music, playing games (mostly indie from GOG) or wandering around this lovely town called Brno.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    I’ve used Linux exclusively for over five years, and less-than-exclusively for even more. I’ve been aware of it for much longer but the main turning point was some time in the 2000s when I really started to learn about open culture and how it actually works.

    Boy, do I remember that revelation: the realization that underneath the absurd mask of commercial software, there is such a massive public network of communities, bringing together people to work according to all the best principles of collaboration there are (transparency, independence, patience, freedom…) and constantly bringing results so often superior to the alternative? It changed the way I look at humanity forever. If I only could repay it somehow…

    That life-calling would be enough, but on top of that, GNU/Linux rewards you in so many ways: the freedom and flexibility it gives you, the things that you can do with your machine if you only want to learn how, the way it boosts your learning (hey, man pages?), what it does with some security-related questions (package management versus google-and-trust-some-setup.exe); any of those things would be reward in itself.

    I could sing this song for hours, so I’ll just stop here.

  3. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

    At work I use Fedora, at home I use Debian. I’m still more of a Debianist at heart, although since I joined Red Hat I have learned a lot about Fedora and I can definitely confirm there are “greener” patches of grass on each side. (Actually, last time I had dual-boot setup, it was Debian/Fedora!)

    So I’m pretty happy with sailing on both ships. With Jolla in my pocket, I ain’t afraid of no seas!

  4. What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?

    i3 with Urxvt pretty much takes care of everything. Own scripts (chained together with dmenu) handle things like app menus, locking, laptop hibernation, so maybe Thunar is the only “desktop environment” app I use.

    GUIs I often use are Claws Mail and web browsers. In that category I use sort of a mixup of qutebrowser, Firefox and vimb. Oh, and when it comes to music, Clementine, Picard and Sound Juicer together pretty much fulfill all my needs.

  5. What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?

    As I mentioned, I do a lot of coding, so I spend most of my time in a terminal emulator, constantly switching between Vim, Git, Bash and usually some ssh session to a testing machine. And few qutebrowser windows here and there.

    The apps are not strictly GNU/Linux-specific, but it’s actually i3 and native Bash that let me link everything together in a way that I can make the most of it.

    That’s the top-down look. I think the bottom-up look may be even more interesting. I actually have sort of a meta-setup: user config files are shared amongst all of my machines. Many of these “dotfiles” are on GitHub, and I have scripts that let me deploy the whole thing to a new box in minutes. This sounds a bit like over-engineering, but I did it pretty long time ago and it paid off many times since: every little tweak I do (from Git alias to bash script or function to vim setting), I do everywhere, and I can always experiment, revert, and review.

    I would never have been able to do anything like that without symlinks, Git and sync tools like OwnCloud (which I’ve replaced with Syncthing). This setup is possible because with GNU/Linux distros (thanks to Yum and Apt) I always have these tools on hand.

  6. What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?

    My most productive layout is a ThinkPad laptop with two 16×9 monitors: one in landscape mode above the laptop, and the other one in portrait mode on the right side. A simple, reliable wired mouse, a cheap SlimStat i220 keyboard, good headphones, and that’s pretty much it.

    Speaking of laptops, I’ve actually never used a laptop other than ThinkPad and I’ve grown so accustomed to the TrackPoint that I’ll probably never be able to!

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Sure, although given my strange layout, I wonder if it will be usable on your blog.

    Quiz question: the i3 color scheme is inspired by …. ?

    (answer: ` rev <<<"x.1 hcnebkroW agimA" `, although I had to make some compromises.)

Interview conducted May 22, 2018

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 Linux Rig on Google+ here, follow me on Twitter here, and subscribe to the feed here.