The Linux Setup – Roxy Dee, Security Architect

December 12, 2018

Like Ruby, I’m a big LXDE fan. It’s so light and quite configureable. Ruby is also a command line enthusiast, so it’s no surprise to see terminal listed as an essential program. It’s also interesting that Ruby has only had Linux laptops and servers until recently. Anecdotally it seems like some computer users are migrating to desktops, rather than using a laptop for everything. As a home desktop user, I approve of this migration. I love a big, comfortable keyboard and screen that you can’t really move.

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?

    I’m a Linux command line enthusiast! I currently work for Hurricane Labs as a security architect and I specialize in vulnerability management. I also create content related to the command line, so if you want to see my “#1LinuxThingADay” or other Linux stuff from me, you can do so on Twitter. I’m @theroxyd.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    I’ve never really been much of a Windows user except to get things done and log off. When I discovered Linux and that I could do whatever I wanted from the command line much easier than any Windows experience I have ever had, I was hooked. I’m obsessed with finding more and more things I can do with Linux.

    It just makes sense to me more than any other operating system I’ve used. I like to try different distros, so I’m all about Linux in its many flavors.

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

    For my desktop, I’m using Lubuntu with LXDE. I also have a cute purple HP Stream that I’ve just put Debian on and I’m using that to develop the command line workshop I’m creating now. Ubuntu and Debian are perfect for my desktop and laptop. Although I’m a Linux nerd, I like to keep it simple when it comes to personal computing.

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

    LXDE. I love how simple and lightweight it is. Especially because my desktop has an Intel chip!

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

    When I’m not surfin’ the web, I’m using terminal. I guess that should come as no surprise given that I enjoy the command line so much.

    A recent discovery for me is Shotcut, which is video editing software. I’m hoping to use this more because I want to start making videos which is something I haven’t really used my Linux desktop for previously.

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

    I’m not much of a hardware nerd so I don’t even remember. I’m using a secondhand computer with an Intel Core i5-3330 CPU that had Windows on it.

    It’s now my first Linux desktop. Every other Linux OS I had was either on a laptop or server, and I went without a desktop for a long time.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Here’s my desktop screenshot.

Interview conducted February 7, 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.

Pinebook: My First Few Surprising Hours With A $99 Linux Laptop

December 6, 2018

I hadn’t heard of this. The specs aren’t great and I’m shocked it comes with a modified KDE by default, but I’m very intrigued (even though everyone seems to agree the keyboard is truly awful). The price-point makes it feel relatively low-risk. I don’t think I’d use this for serious work, but it might be nice to take to conferences and meetings.

Although, apparently for $50 more, you can get elementaryOS running on an Acer C720!

Pinebook: My First Few Surprising Hours With A $99 Linux Laptop | Forbes

The Linux Setup – Kevin Purdy, Wirecutter

December 5, 2018

I know Kevin from his Lifehacker work, where he was always very pro-Linux. He continues to work with Linux, which is what he writes about here. It’s always cool to see an Elementary user out in the wild (although Kevin does give Xfce some love). But as Kevin points out, a strength of Linux is that you can always ignore the desktop environment and get a ton done in the terminal.

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 Kevin Purdy, and I’m a writer. I work for Wirecutter, a New York Times site that recommends the best products for most people.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    The most honest answer is that I love to tinker with things. Beyond that, I want to support and help improve open-source software, and I keep learning more about Unix-type systems and how they work by installing and fixing desktops. And, lately, I’ve come to appreciate that a good Linux desktop doesn’t offer as many distractions (read: games and notifications) as a Windows or Mac system.

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

    I used to dual-boot Ubuntu with Windows 10 on my desktop, but then something went terribly wrong and getting a working system back was painful. So I bought myself more RAM and now run Elementary OS in VirtualBox on my Windows desktop. My work laptop is a Mac, and I dare not mess with it too much, so I sometimes use a Chromebook (the 2015 Toshiba model with the upgraded Intel processor), and run an Ubuntu-based Xfce4 desktop through Crouton on that.

    Now that I see the next question, I realize the answer is actually: Ubuntu, always.

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

    I used to dislike Elementary OS for all the, shall we say, “nerfing” it did to users. But now I kind of appreciate that the desktop always looks pretty slick, and it’s hard to munge it into the ugly beast I probably want. Same thing with Xfce4; sometimes it’s a good thing to keep it simple.

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

    This is a cop-out, but really: terminal. Terminal (maybe more accurately SSH) lets me work on my personal site at Github Pages, gives me my secret favorite email interface (Mutt), allows me to focus my writing in Vim, and offers me the power to update my system without having to click a bunch of things and wait for progress bars to fill up.

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

    As mentioned, I’ve got a Crouton (a chroot) running on a 2015 Toshiba Chromebook. Elementary OS is running inside VirtualBox (for now) on a three-year-old desktop that has gotten incremental upgrades.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Attached! The Crouton desktop (Xfce4) is intentionally untouched. The Elementary OS is obviously arranged for your benefit, but that’s a typical workday setup. The wallpaper is a screenshot from the game Firewatch.

Interview conducted December 20, 2017

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.

Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability — Part 1

December 4, 2018

A really interesting post about the importance of menus for Linux (and for any operating system!)

There’s a section I appreciated:

Look at the GNOME 3 screenshot again. Note what is also missing? A visual clue that Save is Ctrl-S. The menu entries for “Copy”, “Paste” and so on are entirely missing — not just their shortcuts like Ctrl-C, but the whole menu entries.

WordPerfect used to have a paper template you could lay over your keyboard so you could see (and learn) all of the shortcuts. I loved it. I think it’s one of the reasons I hate taking my hands off the keyboard (not that we had mice, back in the day!).

Also, man do I miss WordPerfect…

Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability — Part 1 | Medium

ExpressionEngine Is Now Free

November 29, 2018

It’s also open source! I used ExpressionEngine as my work CMS for years and really loved it. It was quirky and particular, but it was also amazingly powerful. I never ran into something it couldn’t handle. I’m hoping it’ll take off as a free and open source project (although I haven’t used the updated ExpressionEngine—I used a fairly old version that has since been retired).

WordPress can be used as a CMS, but I feel like it’s not baked into its DNA. ExpressionEngine is really a CMS at its heart. This is awesome news.

ExpressionEngine Is Now Free | ExpressionEngine

The Linux Setup – Scott Gilbertson, Writer

November 28, 2018

Scott’s an amazing Linux usage case. He lives off the grid! And he uses Linux for pragmatic, rather than political reasons. Which is nice to hear. While Linux does have lots of social and political advantages, a large part of why I use it is because I think it’s an amazing operating system that allows me to do my best work. And now, thanks to Scott, I know I could do that work in a ’69 Dodge Travco, if push came to shove.

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 Scott Gilbertson. I am a writer (I write about free software for Wired, Ars Technica and others), and Python developer. I live with my wife and three children on the road in a 1969 Dodge Travco. I write about life on the road at my personal site luxagraf.net.

    We live off the grid with all our power coming from solar and a relatively slow 4G modem as our only network connection, which has influenced my choice of hardware and software somewhat. I like to keep things simple, the simpler the better.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    This probably sounds like damning with faint praise, but in the end I use it because it sucks less than everything else.

    While I agree with much of the philosophy behind free software, I’m too practical to use things that don’t work the way I need them to. If Linux didn’t work the way I need it too, honestly, I’d find something else.

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

    I run Arch Linux. I frequently test (and review) software and the Arch User Repository makes this so much easier than trying to compile things myself. Not that compiling is hard, but I seldom actually keep these things around and removing software you compiled yourself (along with it’s unneeded dependencies) is a pain. The AUR and pacman make it very simple to manage all that.

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

    What I look for in a desktop is something that stays out of my way. So for a long time I didn’t really use a desktop, just a window manager.

    For years I used Openbox (which I discovered using CrunchBang Linux), but recently I became a little worried about Openbox’s future. There’s never going to be a Wayland port and at some point Wayland will likely be the default display manager for most distros.

    About a month ago I switched to i3 because it’s minimal and there’s already a Wayland port (Sway). I like it so far, though I admit I use it more like Openbox than the proper tiling window manager it is. But it does what I want, has plenty of keyboard shortcuts and generally stays out of the way.

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

    Almost everything I do these days happens in a terminal. Aside from editing photos (darktable, GIMP) and browsing the web (Firefox) I’m almost always in the terminal (rxvt-unicode) and tabbed with Tmux.

    I depend on mutt and offlineimap for email, newsboat for RSS, rtorrent, mpd with ncmpcpp for music, ranger for browsing files, and last, but not least, I depend on Vim far more than anything else. All my writing is done in Vim, all my finances are tracked via beancount in Vim, I even use Evernote through Vim via geeknote and geeknote-vim.

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

    Lenovo x250, which I chose primarily for its small size and long battery life (with a six cell I can get about nine hours; more if I dim the screen a bit). It also isn’t hard to take apart so I can upgrade the hard drive and screen.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Unfortunately it’s pretty boring, but here’s a screenshot of my primary desktop.

Interview conducted December 19, 2017

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 – Peter Cossey, This Little Duck

November 21, 2018

So it literally took Peter a few years ago to respond to my interview request and then it took me a few years to post! I’m super grateful to the patience shown by so many of my subjects. Lately, by the time I post, their set-up has changed. I’m working my way through my backlog. I got married and my wife and I had a beautiful daughter, which is part of how I fell so far behind. But Peter’s interview is worth the wait! From his love of of ThinkPads to his love of good application launchers, much of what he said resonated very strongly with me.

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?

    I’m Peter Cossey, I’m the co-founder and Managing Director of This Little Duck and I build software for the web.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    I was exposed to Linux while studying computer science at university and when I started to build websites I was using it on different hosting services, but it wasn’t my main desktop operating system until 2012. The previous operating systems I had used were Windows NT4, BeOS and then OS X 10.2. I really enjoyed using OS X and appreciated the tight integration between the software and the hardware, I accepted the “it just works” mantra with open arms.

    My move away from Apple hardware and OS X was a combination of my concerns about the Apple software ecosystem (especially around issues like censorship and control in the app store) and also the improvements to desktop Linux distributions like Ubuntu. More and more I found that using Linux as my main operating system made sense from a professional standpoint—if I’m building software that is running on Linux servers, there are advantages to running Linux on my development workstation. The thing I enjoy about most of the modern Linux desktop operating systems is the hardware support. Strangely enough, I find that old peripherals and cutting-edge hardware are more likely to “just work” out of the box with Linux.

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

    Ubuntu 17.04

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

    I’m using the stock Unity that comes with Ubuntu 17.04 but I’m about to upgrade my machine to 17.10 so I guess that means running GNOME Shell soon. I spend most of my time using a text editor or a browser or the terminal so I’m not too fussy about the desktop environment; stability, UI consistency and a decent launcher are all I need.

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

    Rather than a single piece of software, I think I depend on the Ubuntu eco-system and community. It’s a Linux distro that has attracted a lot of new users who might otherwise be running OS X or Windows and in relation to the broader Linux community, I think it’s a case of a rising tide lifting all boats.

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

    Lenovo ThinkPad T450s. Even before I used Linux, I was a fan of IBM ThinkPad laptops and since switching to Ubuntu as my desktop OS I’ve become even more attached to the T and X ThinkPad series. The machines themselves are durable, robust and no-nonsense laptops and the Linux support on the business-orientated models is fantastic. In five plus years of running Ubuntu on ThinkPads, I can’t think of any hardware compatibility problems I had to deal with.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Sure thing.

Interview conducted November 20, 2017

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.