Weekly Musings 115 – On the Follow Button

June 9, 2021

No matter what people say, pulling the plug on Google Reader didn’t kill RSS. It didn’t hurt RSS. RSS might have been knocked around a bit by Reader’s disappearance, but it’s far from dead.
If RSS was hurt, that hurt was inflicted by people too lazy to switch to another feed reader, despite being given months to make the switch. That hurt was doled out by people who opted to get their information and barely-informed opinions from Twitter and Facebook and the like. We all know how well that turned out…

Scott Nesbitt loves RSS as much as I do!

Weekly Musings 115 – On the Follow Button | Weekly Musings

Göktuğ Kayaalp's desktop

The Linux Setup – Göktuğ Kayaalp, Student

April 14, 2021

Göktuğ seems to privilege portability. They’re interested in moving to GuixSD, which uses a single configuration file, making it easier to replicate system set-ups. I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 (the GNOME spin from before Ubuntu used it by default), to 20.04 and while it didn’t take a long time to reinstall my software, it took a bit of time and made me wish there was some kind of manifest that would let me tell the new install what software to grab. Göktuğ also shares out configurations, including for Emacs, in a public repository, which is very generous. I found Göktuğvia via the contact form. I’m always happy to hear from people about their set-up!

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 master’s student in linguistics and a long time programming hobbyist. I’ve been fiddling with computers since I was in elementary school, taught myself programming (or more correctly, learned it off of the internet, mostly), and had a fun time ever since. I was to become a professional programmer, but thanks to some events in my life I’ve decided to pursue an academic career in social sciences. That the way I wound up in a new cohort of folks in social sciences and humanities that have an interest in computing, software freedom, and open science.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    Linux is my main operating system these days. My workstation computer has been running GNU/Linux almost uninterruptedly since 2012, save for a year I—quite happily—used FreeBSD as my main operating system. I originally started playing with Linux as a kid, mostly out of curiosity, but what captivated me and made me a permanent user was how free and open source systems were way more stable and configurable compared to other operating systems, and readily receptive of my (or anyone else’s, for that matter) peculiar use cases and workflows.

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

    Since March 2020 I’ve been running Linux Mint on my laptop as it is very good at plug-and-play, and running apps like Zoom. Before that I used a custom i3wm based desktop on Debian (sometimes on testing), and even before I used the same setup, but with Arch supporting it.

    I’ve recently built a desktop computer, and currently it runs Linux Mint, but in the coming months I wish to move to GuixSD on that system, as I don’t really need to run troublesome software on it or hotplug devices often. GuixSD has many nifty features, like essentially version-controlling your whole OS, with a single configuration file for the whole system, or generating a VM image or install disk for it, with all your packages and configs, all thanks to reproducible builds. It’s awesome, and I believe it’s the best thing to happen to computing since the FOSS releases of 1990s and the introduction of package managers.

  4. What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
    Currently I run Cinnamon, because I love how it saves its configuration to clear text JSON files under ~/.cinnamon, which I can check-in to my dotfiles repository, besides regularly dumping the dconf database, so that my setup is easily repeatable. I make a lot of use of the gTile extension (Cinnamon extensions are called ‘Spices’ ) for manually tiling windows. It’s not as good as XMonad, but good enough considering all the goodies Cinnamon has to offer, especially for a mobile laptop setup.

  5. What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
    It’s not exactly Linux-specific, but the one piece of software I depend upon is GNU Emacs. It’s my text editor, my collection of notebooks, my custom-made toolbox, and my malleable, cozy workspace.

    As for something that’s actually Linux-specific, I can say distro package managers have been crazy helpful, and I don’t know how I’d live without them, chasing installers around the web, fearing malware, and running seldom-updated software. Package managers like apt/dpkg, pacman, and recently guix, are essential tools for me, as they make for a repeatable, reliable, trustworthy, safe working environment, which I value highly as a user, and which is hard to replicate on systems that lack them.

  6. What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
    My laptop is an ancient Asus laptop from early 2010s, but it works and I’m mostly home these days so I’m in no rush to replace it.

    As for the desktop, it’s a custom built desktop based on the newly released AMD Ryzen CPUs. I have 16GB RAM on it, which sadly feels like the lowest amount that allows for a comfortable desktop experience these days. I have a combined large-enough-for-the-OS SSD and a larger HDD for user files setup.

    As for peripherals, I use a vertical mouse which has been a huge improvement (mine is a Trust branded one), and what I think is called an 80% mechanical keyboard (basically it lacks a number pad), from a brand called Redragon, which would look beautiful if I was not lazy about repainting it, although it’s comfy to type on nevertheless. I currently have one Acer 24" display, which I sometime soon wish to couple with an additional vertical 18" display. Lastly, I have a blue Ikea Tertial desk lamp that is almost useless, but it’s so cute I can’t not mention it

    I also run a local backup server with the FOSS Borg backup software on a Raspberry Pi 3B+, which also serves as a print/scan server for a cheap HP printer which I almost exclusively use for scanning. The RPi runs on what I installed as Raspbian, but apparently the name has changed since. Sometime soon I’ll replace that with Debian or maybe even a BSD.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Of course! Here’s a screenshot of my desktop workstation. It’s mostly a vanilla Cinnamon setup, although I’ve temporarily disabled desktop icons for privacy.

Göktuğ Kayaalp's desktop

Interview conducted March 25, 2021

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 – L.J. Lee, Translator/Researcher/Writer

March 31, 2021

I found L.J. on Mastodon (hi!), and I’m so glad I did. This is a fantastic set-up and finding Linux story. And I love the emphasis on learning, which is a fun side-effect of working with Linux; you can’t help but learn stuff. L.J. uses Arch and no desktop environment, which seems impressive to me. It’s another thing I appreciate about L.J’s setup: it comes from a vision.

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 L.J., a translator, researcher, and writer living in Korea. I translate between English and Korean, with legal documents my bread-and-butter. But I’ve also worked with tabletop roleplaying books, art history, literature, and more. I’ve also written a couple of books in my research field and was the lead writer of an educational video series about biodiversity and international law. My main online presence is on my Mastodon account: https://rage.love/@ljwrites .

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    Frankly it was that or buy a new computer. I used MacOS from 2015 to 2020, but my hardware couldn’t keep up with the OS updates. When I held back on updates to preserve my customizations and maintain performance I found myself increasingly unsupported and abandoned, unable to install or update apps. My machine, a 2015 Macbook Air, had been made purposefully impossible to upgrade and I either had to abandon a perfectly functional machine or resign myself to a total lack of support.

    Even worse, I looked over the new features for the latest OS updates and found nothing that would enhance my experience as a user; just more features designed to monetize me as a customer making recurring payments, and lock me into the Apple ecosystem. It was clear that the support for my older Air was not there in the long term and Apple was taking its personal computing environment in a direction I disagreed with.

    I wasn’t new to Linux or free software. I had a little experience using Ubuntu from about a decade back, and had been interested for some years in free and open source software developments. So I thought, why not Linux? And if I was going to move anyway, I figured it was better do it sooner rather than later so I could learn and settle down on my new system. The Mac environment wasn’t getting any friendlier to me with time anyway, and I decided not to stick around until things became completely intolerable.

    Cue a trial period with Linux on a virtual machine, a flurry of research and preparation, then taking the jump to wipe Mac OS off the machine to do a bare-metal installation of Linux. The Macbook Air is now a Linux machine that I am much happier with.

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

    I use Arch. The choice was originally because of resource constraints, since my switch to Linux started out on a VM sharing space on a machine where I had very little storage and less RAM to spare. I liked how lean Arch started out, with practically nothing on the system except what I chose to put there. The package management was great, too, and I liked the idea of a rolling release and the AUR—basically all the reasons people cite for using Arch and derivatives. That’s why I decided to continue on with Arch to do a bare-metal install on the whole machine. I love the feeling of building a system just for me, piece by piece, that grows with me as I learn.

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

    The i3 Window Manager without a desktop environment. One of the reasons I chose vanilla Arch was because it didn’t come by default with a DE that I wouldn’t use anyway. On my previous systems, Windows and MacOS, I’d already been trying to use the desktop like a tiling window manager before I knew about tiling window managers. I hid away the dock by default, set keyboard shortcuts to resize and move windows, and always took up as much space as possible with my working windows. So once I learned about tiling window managers I figured, hey, why not cut out the middleman and go WM-only? And it’s working great for me so far, with less mouse usage, instant switching between workspaces, and easy configurability—all on an environment that stays out of my way while I do my job.

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

    Emacs! It’s optimized to Linux and similar systems. I use Emacs for so many things, drastically cutting down on the number of apps I use and more tightly integrating my workflow within Emacs. Emacs is not only my plaintext editor but also my to-do and schedule manager, which integrates writing and research tracking (Org Mode/Org Agenda), terminal emulator for everyday use (term-mode), file manager (Dired), Git interface (Magit), and email software (Mu4e). I’m typing these answers right now in Emacs, in fact.

    I also use Evil Mode and related packages for Vim-style keybindings in all modes. For me it’s the best of both worlds. I chose to start with vanilla Gnu Emacs and build my way up from there, because while the Emacs distros like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs are fantastic, I’d rather know everything that’s going on with my configuration so I know how to fix and change things. Again, I like the feeling of building my computing environment as I learn.

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

    The aforementioned Macbook Air, a 2015 model with dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 CPU, 4GB RAM, and 230GB or so of SSD. I actually use it as a desktop replacement these days, kept in its cubby and hardly ever opened except on the rare occasion I need to boot it up, with a flatscreen across the room connected through an HDMI dongle, a vertically rotated Dell monitor attached via USB using DisplayLink, and a mechanical keyboard and Bluetooth trackball as input devices.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    This is the Emacs Mu4e screen I’m writing in. With Emacs set at 80% opacity with Picom, the background—a random selection from screenshots of the video game Gris—shows through, which is like a visual equivalent of background music that keeps my ADHD brain from getting bored.

    The second screenshot is the wallpaper in full on an empty workstation, with a few more workspaces populated to show the Nerd Font icons I put in the i3bar.

L.J. Lee's Emacs

L.J. Lee's desktop

Interview conducted March 22, 2021

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.

Introducing the Framework Laptop

March 18, 2021

Today, we are excited to unveil our first product: the Framework Laptop, a thin, lightweight, high-performance 13.5” notebook that can be upgraded, customized, and repaired in ways that no other notebook can.

This is cool: a sustainable laptop that’s designed to be upgradeable, rather than disposable. But the even better part:

…with the ability to choose Windows or install your preferred Linux distribution. Regardless of the path you take, we include a screwdriver in the box so you can upgrade over time.

I’ll keep an eye on this.

Introducing the Framework Laptop | Framework