The Linux Setup: Leonora Tindall, Student and Maintainer

April 17, 2019

I found Leonora via her System76 Thelio review. She uses Pop!_OS which is based upon GNOME, and it seems to work for her. Like many of us, she’s tried different desktops and she’s settled on the one that’s most convenient. I remain very curious about System76 hardware. However, I also remain curious about rooting a Chromebook, which is way cheaper. I’m not 100% certain I’ll ever do either.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.

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

    I’m a computer science student at Beloit College, an open source contributor and maintainer, and an avid amateur radio operator.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    I initially learned about Linux because my parents gave me an old laptop without a hard drive when I was a kid, and lacking the money to buy either a hard drive or a Windows license, I ended up running Ubuntu 10.04 off of a USB thumb drive. Nowadays, I’ve tried to use both Windows and Mac OS, but neither one of them has the performance, tooling, or stability that desktop Linux has given me.

  3. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop? What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?

    My desktop is stock Pop!_OS from System76, with GNOME 3 as the desktop environment. I’ve used Ubuntu for a long time, whether mainline 10.04, Xubuntu 14.10, or Kubuntu 16.04. Pop!_OS is the vendor-provided OS for my very awesome System76 Thelio, and it’s almost exactly the same as stock Ubuntu, so there’s no real reason for me to ditch it.

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

    For me, there’s no one piece of software that makes Linux the best environment. Rather, it’s the fact that everything in the whole system is geared towards interoperability via the Unix toolset that makes it such a great platform. I do my editing in Vim, search code with Ripgrep, and of course use the whole coreutils and moreutils toolbelts to get
    work done.

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

    A System76 Thelio.

  6. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

*Interview conducted March 31, 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.

The end of the desktop?

April 16, 2019

I’ve been predicting for a while that Microsoft is moving us away from its PC-centric Windows operating system to a cloud-based rental version of Windows. Now, with the Windows Virtual Desktop beta finally showing up, we’re a step closer to the death of the PC.

This is an interesting opinion piece from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Vaughan-Nichols speculates that eventually the only locally-based operating systems might be OS X and Linux.

I understand the loss of control he’s worried about. But it would be great for me. I have a Windows partition that I use for a few annoying Windows tasks. Like track changes isn’t flawless going LibreOffice to Office. So I’d love to have a virtual machine I could visit, that doesn’t require my local disk space.

But I get why others might not love that they have to use a terminal to compute. Again.

The end of the desktop? | Computerworld

Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers’ libraries

April 11, 2019

Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money, so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1.

Customers will receive refunds.

Just to repeat: Customers will receive refunds (and apparently, if you annotated your book, you’ll get an extra $25). But this isn’t just about money. It’s about control. People think they’re buying music and books, but they’re just renting access. Access that be removed with the speed of a pivot.

I’m not an ebook person but I only buy music where I can download the tracks. I have no interest in having to reacquire music because someone somewhere made a business decision.

Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers’ libraries | Boing Boing

The Linux Setup – Dennis Felsing, Software Developer

April 10, 2019

I found Dennis via this post and wanted to hear more! This setup is pretty refined. In fact, it’s almost Zen in its simplicity. It wouldn’t work for me, but it works for Dennis. It’s also great to hear from someone who’s used Arch for over a decade without any major problems. I always wonder how common that is. We tend to hear from new users who might experience some challenges, but we don’t always hear from the people who have used it for years without any drama. FULL DISCLOSURE: My Arch setup flamed out after a few months…

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.

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

    My name is Dennis Felsing and I’m a software developer working at SAP on the HANA database. I also occasionally
    blog and work on my game project.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    It just stuck. I came from Windows initially and Gentoo won me over by making me grok Linux internals. I never went back after that since I felt Linux gave me more flexibility.

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

    My laptop fan failed from the constant compilation that Gentoo brings with it. So I switched one machine after the other to Arch Linux over a span of a few years. I haven’t had any major problems with Arch in over 10 years, yet.

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

    I chose the xmonad tiling window manager because it is written and configured in Haskell and at the time I was infatuated with the programming language. Nowadays I don’t need to change the configuration much and it still works great, allowing me to navigate with the keyboard, giving me great flexibility and extendability.

    I also use conky & dzen for a simple status and notification bar.

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

    It’s all about the shell making composing programs easy. In a few steps I can automate what would be annoying manual work in a GUI-based workflow. vim is similar in this regard for any kind of text editing, like email or notes.

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

    Mostly a tiny Mini-ITX PC with an Intel i7-6700k hiding behind my combined 40″ screen/TV. You can read more about my desktop computer in a dedicated blog post.

    On the road I still use my eternally-young Thinkpad x200s. Thanks to the minimalistic command line software available on Linux it still performs great.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Sure, here you can see my laptop updating the system, compiling two projects, and syncing my emails and notes.

    On the desktop I just split my giant screen into four virtual 1920×1080 screens because otherwise I’d have more space than I’d know what to do with (except for watching movies).

Interview conducted February 27, 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.

The Linux Setup – Matthew Scheuerman, User Interface Designer

April 3, 2019

I found Matthew on reddit, telling a story about how Linux got him out of a tough jam. I reached out and here we are! It should be unsurprising that a user experience designer is very interested in the aesthetics of the desktop experience. What’s nice about so many Linux distributions is that tweaking the appearance is really just a matter of choosing from a few menus. Changing the look of your Linux desktop is very doable. Unless you use GNOME, which is committed to the stock look. Which I happen to like. Matthew hints at getting interested in KDE, and if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on his eventually finding his way there.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.

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

    I’m Matthew Scheuerman. I’m a user experience designer. For the past year I’ve been focused on creating a SASS/CSS/HTML/Tokens/Native web components toolkit for an enterprise level design system. I’ve had a hand in creating user interface (UI)/web designs in Adobe Photoshop/XD, Sketch, and Balsamiq, but right now I’m more focused on code, atomic-level design, user experience strategy, and implementing a design system.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    Freedom of choice and user interfaces. In recent years, GUIs of Linux distros, desktop environments, and window managers have grown and have started to resemble the kinds of fantasy UIs we see in movies/games. I saw a lot of fantasy user interfaces like these inside /r/unixporn. With few exceptions, trying to to get Windows/Mac to resemble these kind of slick interfaces is extremely difficult. Trying to get Mac/Windows to utilize a consistently dark UI across multiple applications or trying to control things as simple of the placement of the application close button is nearly impossible. With many Linux distros, you can control of how your environment looks and behaves right out of the box. Window snapping/tiling and window management is horrible in Windows/Mac’s current operating systems. With Cinnamon on Linux Mint, I was snapping windows and moving around workspaces within a day. Just a bit ago I started ricing my own theme as well.

    I also wanted to learn Linux. I started to use Mac’s terminal at work, and started to experiment with Raspberry Pis. Switching to Linux for my main distro became a natural progression. I had first seen Linux when one of my two best friends (we’re the Three Amigos), showed me Red Hat Linux 3. I blame some of my interest in Linux on him. Right after college I tried Obi-Wan College Linux, but I couldn’t run it as my main desktop distro. Now I have three Raspberry Pis, and two PCs running Linux Mint, another that runs Linux Mint Mate, and a server that runs Ubuntu. Most of these have been set-up in the last six months.

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

    I run Linux Mint and probably will for a while. I really like Ubuntu but I really liked some of the “out of the box” UI options that Linux Mint gave me. Since Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, it gave a beginning user like me a great software manager to get started. Now apt-get has become second nature to me, and there’s a lot of great software written for Ubuntu.

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

    I really like Cinnamon on Linux Mint. I tried a bunch of a WMs for it but eventually settled on the default: Muffin. i3/i3-gaps and awesomewm called my name for a bit but it was much easier to get up and running with something a little more GUI based when I was just starting. I am seeing some really cool UIs with KDE Plasma though…

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

    It’s such a hard question to answer, because there are so many tools that are available on Linux, Mac, and Windows, so it’s hard to find something that is only available on Linux. For that, I choose Terminator Terminal. There might be other tools available on all operating systems that work like it, but I find that it is the best multi-terminal tool I’ve tried to date. Whenever I try to show off the kind of cool interfaces Linux can provide, I will run Terminator on top of an animated Komorebi desktop background. This definitely turns heads.

    If I was to choose any tool though? Zim Desktop Wiki. I only discovered this because it runs on Linux and showed up in the Software Manager. If I need to remember how to do something or run something in the command line/terminal, I make a note of it there.

    I’m really looking forward to trying Akira as a Linux-based SketchApp alternative, when the need arises.

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

    Lenovo ThinkPad T430 with 8GB RAM. I fell in love with ThinkPads after doing just a basic amount of research. I looked to see which reddit-based laptop community had the most fervent subreddit. It was /r/ThinkPad. I also watched a video from AA Computers and Technology on his YouTube channel about the ThinkPad T430. I was thoroughly impressed with how scalable and upgradable it is. In my opinion it is one of the best ThinkPads made by Lenovo. I fully intend to swap out the screen with a 1920×1080 one and add two more SSD drives, 16GB RAM, an i7, and change out the keyboard. It has a dogfish brand 120GB MSATA drive in the bottom that I added on Christmas morning and it took less than five minutes. I use a docking station when I’m at home that connects to one of my monitors. When I travel, I always carry an HDMI cable with me with a display port adapter. I can connect to the hotel room TV and use it as a giant monitor. Running gotop, atop, and htop on a huge screen looks really cool. It also makes staying in a hotel much more enjoyable. Instead of watching Netflix on my phone, I can just watch Netflix via my Linux machine and do some work on that, or my work laptop. When I’m home, I connect my machine to an EXP GDC Beast eGPU dock through the PCI-E slot on the T430. I’m using an old Sapphire R9 380 card. Despite hearing some crazy things about how difficult it is to run an eGPU on Linux Mint and an AMD-based card, I had it set up in a day. It’s not the best setup but it does allow me to run some games I couldn’t previously play.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

Interview conducted March 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.

The Linux Setup – Carlos Echenique, Photographer

March 27, 2019

I found Carlos via this Linux Journal article he wrote about using Linux for photography. There’s a lot of great information in this interview. Like I never knew what was meant by RAW with photo images. And now I do! I also appreciate that Carlos is a desktop person. I find desktops so much more comfortable than laptops. It might be a symptom of my age, but I prefer to think that my taste is becoming more refined.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.

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

    My name is Carlos Echenique. I am a fine art and travel photographer based out of Miami, Florida. I have been interested in photography since I was twelve-years-old, when my parents gave me their Yashica TL Electro SLR camera. I am also an IT professional with 34 years of experience.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    I have been dabbling in Linux since the Slackware days. As an IT professional (and the son of aircraft mechanic), the thought of really “getting my hands dirty” with an operating system was very attractive to me. However, my day job forced me to use more mainstream operating systems and applications, so Linux was kept as a “fun” side-project for many years. Linux continued to steadily improve, as did the applications that ran on it.

    In 2017, some members of my Photography Club challenged me to put together a “low-cost portable digital darkroom.” Most of the commercial photography software had some pretty hefty hardware requirements and using Apple hardware would definitely not fall under the category of “low-cost.” So I took it upon myself to research open-source solutions to the challenge posed by my club members. The software was available and fairly mature, but the hardware was going to be an issue. That’s when I decided to go “the full Monty” and run it on a Linux machine. The lighter footprint of Linux would allow a lesser machine to perform reasonably well against a beefier (and more expensive) one running Windows. I picked up a Lenovo Flex4-14 laptop from one of the big box clubs for $499. I had a 1TB SSD drive laying about, so I replaced the spinning rust drive with that and installed Linux and various opens-source photography and graphics applications and the system works a treat. It is my travel laptop to this day.

    In fact, this worked so well that I converted my desktop system (and daily driver) to Linux.

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

    Both my desktop and laptop run KDE Neon 18.04. KDE Neon is built on a solid Ubuntu LTS base (18.04) and is rolling release for the desktop environment.

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

    KDE is my desktop environment of choice. As previously mentioned, KDE Neon gives me all the new KDE goodies as soon as KDE releases them. The current KDE desktop is very flexible and configurable.

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

    Darktable. As a photographer, I save my images in the RAW (or native) format. In order for me to create a usable image, I have to develop them from the RAW files. Think of the RAW files as digital negatives and you’ll get the idea. Darktable is the software that allows me to convert those “digital negatives” into files that are more easily readable, like JPG files. Why do I go to all of this trouble if the digital camera can already produce JPG files? Because in-camera JPG files are like Polaroid instant prints: fully processed by someone else’s standards. Darktable (and other applications) allow me to take full control of the image development process and create photographs that truly reflect my own style.

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

    Being an old-school IT person at heart, I am much more comfortable with a desktop system and relegate my laptop to travel duties. Here are my desktop specs:

    • AMD ThreadRipper 1900X 8C/16T CPU
    • 32GB RAM (4x8GB) in Quad Channel configuration
    • 1TB WD Blue nVME Drive (OS drive)
    • 4TB WD Blue 3.5″ SATA Drive (home folder)
    • 4TB RAID-10 Drive Array (via BTRFS) (photo working storage)
    • 9TB External USB3 RAID-5 Array (first stage backup)
    • Nvidia 2070 RTX Graphics Card
    • Dell U3417W Ultra-wide Curved Display
    • Logitech MX Ergo Trackball
    • Wacom Intuos4 Medium-sized Pen Tablet
    • Kono Kira 96-key Mechanical Keyboard

    I also have a 9TB OpenMediaVault NAS for backups. I use Syncthing to copy images from my external RAID-5 to the NAS. Every night the NAS uses Duplicati to back itself up to Backblaze B2 Storage. My wife’s Windows 10 machine also has a Drobo 5C that synchronizes the same way, giving me three local copies of my images.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Absolutely!

Interview conducted January 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.

textbook-evaluation-toolkit

March 26, 2019

This isn’t strictly Linux-related, but it is related to openness. I spent the past year as part of a team training students to evaluate textbooks. The goal of the project was to get student voices in the mix for Open Education Resources.

The toolkit we used for this project is ready and we put it up on GitHub, with the hope that others will use our work. I’m posting this here 1) out of pride and 2) to reach open-minded educators.

textbook-evaluation-toolkit | GitHub