Desktop Linux for Everyone
On the one hand, it’s annoying Joseph Gordon-Levitt is so handsome, talented, and versatile.
On the other hand, it’s very cool he’s supporting the open source cause.
Also, I like that he played Cobra Commander…
Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt to Speak on Art and the Internet at Open Source Summit North America
I’m not interested in an iPod per se, but I do wish there were decent MP3 players, with at least 32GB of memory, at a mid-range price point. And, of course, one that plays well with Linux…
One of my dreams is to start doing my academic writing in LaTeX. I haven’t gotten around to it. But also, most publishers I work with just want a Word file. I suspect (or hope?) that will change as more publishers start to use git for manuscript preparation.
But now Microsoft has taken a new tack. It admitted that it turned off rivals’ antivirus software. Rob Lefferts, Microsoft’s partner director of the Windows & Devices Group, Security & Enterprise, said, yes, Windows 10 Creators Update disabled third-party antivirus products — but only in a few circumstances, and for a short time.
I get that Microsoft has all kinds of users of varying degrees of technical ability, but to take a position of “We know what’s best for your system,” just doesn’t feel very secure to me.
GNOME Flashback is a session for GNOME 3 which was initially called “GNOME Fallback”, and shipped as a stand-alone session in Debian and Ubuntu. It provides a similar user experience to the GNOME 2.x series sessions. The differences to the MATE project is that GNOME Flashback uses GTK+ 3 and tries to follow the current GNOME development by integrating recent changes of the GNOME libraries. The development currently lags behind a little but a lot of progress has been made and most importantly many open bugs have been fixed.
I love GNOME 3 but it’s nice that there are options for people who don’t. Flashback reminds me of Trinity, which is KDE 3.5.
No desktop environment truly ever dies.
Scott is shutting down is wonderful blog. Luckily, he says he has another project on deck.
I can’t wait for it. But I’m going to miss Notes from a Floating Life.
“People don’t fully appreciate that the reason we have Google and Facebook today is because there was an antitrust enforcement action against Microsoft that slowed down the ability of Microsoft to monopolize the internet, the browsers, the data, search, and so on,” said Luigi Zingales, finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “Today’s monopolies are yesterday’s startups. In a good system, this keeps changing.”
A relatively accessible explanation of containers and why they’re important:
Containers are essentially lightweight, configurable virtual machines — simulated versions of an operating system and its hardware, which allow software developers to share their computational environments.
I’ve written about my love of specific clipboard managers before (here and here) but I haven’t talked about why I love them.
A clipboard manager is a program that retains a history of items you’ve copied or cut to your clipboard. Most operating systems only save the last thing you copied or cut by default. The clipboard manager allows you to review your clipboard history. Wikipedia gets into the details.
As someone who works with a lot of text, I find the clipboard manager to be an indispensable tool. For instance, when moving text around, the clipboard manager allows me to go back to a previous cut-and-paste and insert text where it should have gone, rather than where I put it.
In moving this site to WordPress, I spent a fair amount of time copying-and-pasting text and HTML. The ability to go back to previously copy-and-pasted snippets was a huge time-saver. I also find it tremendously helpful when I accidentally copy something over what I really wanted to keep in the buffer. This happens a lot when I Ctrl-C when I really wanted to Ctrl-V.
GNOME has a built-in clipboard manager, but there are lots of them for Linux. I’ve used Parcellite and Clipman and couldn’t tell you the difference between either of them, which is the beauty of the clipboard manager. As long as it can show you a history of things you’ve copied or cut, it’s working just fine. The interface is usually less important.
I’ll acknowledge that there are security risks with clipboard managers. If you copy-and-paste passwords, they’re in your history. Most clipboard managers allow you to selectively delete items if having a password existing in your clipboard history troubles you. If you share your user account with someone, it’s a legitimate concern. I also had a colleague who used a clipboard manager on what was essentially a public terminal, which is a pretty awful idea.
With that caveat, clipboard managers are wonderfully useful tools. It’s almost like a time machine for your cut or copied text. Anyone who works with words will quickly come to appreciate the ability to return to text that was worked with just a few copy or pastes ago.
If your desktop environment doesn’t already include a clipboard manager, there are a few options in your repository. The clipboard manager will quickly make itself indispensable to you.
Update: Opensource.com has a nice roundup of Linux clipboard managers (via Scott Nesbitt)
Or, you can just not use Gmail… I remain in love with FastMail.
