Desktop Linux for Everyone
I know I give a lot of ThinkPad love and attention, so I wanted to highlight someone who’s content with their work Dell running Xubuntu.
Dell Latitude 5310 | f5n
I think Jon’s ability to keep his system frozen in time, yet up-to-date is the biggest argument for using Linux. Desktop environments have moved in a direction that doesn’t work for him, so Jon uses his own spin does. It’s also very cool that Jon makes music using Linux. It’s something that once interested me a lot. Now I’m less interested in recording music and more interested in writing about it, but these things change over time. Also, Jon reached out to me via the form. It’s always great to hear from people about their set-ups!
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.
Who are you, and what do you do?
Hello. My name is Jon Kukuk. I am a contract Linux System Administrator and musician. My wife and I live in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. For the last 20 years I have been a contract Linux System Administrator at many large companies around the country. In 2008 I released a music CD entitled Uncharted Currents, made in part on a Linux box. I am a multi-instrumentalist and play guitar, bass, drums and other instruments, and do everything myself, with no other musicians
Why do you use Linux?
I can sum it up in one one word: freedom. I am for the underdog, the oppressed, the one no one cares about. I don’t like Wall Street, big business and corporate greed. I do not, and will not, use anything connected to Micro$oft, and while I do have several Macs, I use them because at least OS X is Unix-based. I’m still running Mojave and will probably leave them at that level. I can do things with Linux that I can’t with the other choices out there. I heard about Linux around 1997 and picked up a copy of Red Hat 6 when it came out in 1999.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
For the last seven years I have used my own modified version of RHEL 6 that I call Mountain Linux. I have been working on my own RPM-based Linux From Scratch version. It used to be called LogikxSolutions Enterprise Linux, which was the name of my personal corporate contracting LLC. But I wanted to get away from the Red Hat theme. It is still RHEL 6 deep down, but I patched and compiled custom kernels for it, and I’m currently at 4.14.215mlrt-rt105. It is a real-time kernel for my music production. I removed as much of the Red Hat corporate bologna as I could—names, icons, etc.—from the original release. I don’t like or use systemd, so that leaves out all the new versions after RHEL 6. Prior to that, it was still all the previous iterations of Red Hat from 1999 to 2014. I stick with what I know, and Red Hat is how I made a living for the last 21 years. It is sometimes difficult to keep an obsolete OS going, but that’s where I’m at. I do have one 12.04 Ubuntu Server VM that I use for a web server.
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
GNOME 2.x exclusively. I never liked KDE or the other window managers, and GNOME 3 and 4 are horrible. Flat design is horrible. It is aptly named because it falls flat on its face. I like round, full designs that have presence and stand out. This new breed of UX developers are out of touch with reality as far as what they think is cool and what actually works. But then I am very old fashioned and stick with what works for me. If it worked 10 years ago, that’s what I still use. I use the KISS principle because keeping up with the Joneses just isn’t for me. I have tried Mate, but I still prefer the old version of GNOME.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
I like and use a broad range of applications and tools, I couldn’t narrow it down to just one. Although I am partial to Audacity, which was used in the recording of Uncharted Currents.
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
I just finished rebuilding my main box, which I built myself back in 2005. The case and sound card are from the same year, 2005. I reuse everything I can; I don’t spend money unless I have to. I put in a new 500 watt power supply, and then went on from there. The video card is a 2012ish Nvidia GeForce GT-610 1GB card. Other than playing Tux Racer or GNOME Mines, I’m not a gamer. The sound card is a 2003 M-Audio 2496, although I mainly use either a Yamaha AG-06 2 channel or a Mackie 12 channel USB mixer, bypassing the sound card. I have no complaints with either under my OS. The motherboard is an X58, socket 1366, with a used 6 core Xeon processor hyper-threaded to 12 cores, and uses 16GB of DDR3 memory. I run an almost identical VM test box with the same software load on my 2012 Macbook Pro, which also has 16GB of memory.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
While it is not a pretty background image, it is typical of the applications that I use. I normally just have a plain color background so I don’t stare at a pretty picture and get distracted. These are just some of the various music applications that I use. Typically, I don’t run all of these at the same time. Maybe two or three.
Interview conducted February 27, 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.
LibreOffice’s default spellcheck is awful.
I hadn’t noticed until I joined a writing group that uses Google Docs to gather feedback. Google caught a lot of stuff and I started to think it would be nice if my word processor had similar functionality in 2021.
I read up and discovered LanguageTool, a LibreOffice add-on. It requires Java, which made me nervous about performance, but it’s been fine for the past week or so. It’s not blowing my mind, but it behaves much more like a modern spellcheck, so it was worth the installation for me.
I’m not sure this is a purely Linux issue, but it’s a work-from-home technical challenge.
I use Thunderbird/Lightning as my master calendar so I can see my days in one place. I subscribed to my work Outlook feed and could see everything in Thunderbird.
For some reason, recurring events would get stuck in that calendar, though. Like if a recurring meeting moved, it would still display. On the one hand, it’s always nice to realize you don’t have a meeting. But it’s probably better to have an accurate grasp on your time.
I looked into the issue and couldn’t really see any solutions (nor even how to express the problem). But I noticed that in my Fastmail web calendar, where I also subscribed to my work calendar, everything displayed perfectly. So I now subscribe to the Fastmail version of my work calendar.
It’s not pretty, but it’s not ugly either. And most importantly of all, it works.
So if your Outlook calendar is giving you similar problems with recurring events, try adding it to a web calendar and subscribe to that.
And yes, my Plan B was to keep adding adding calendars to calendars to calendars.
This shouldn’t surprise me, but apparently you can run Linux on a Microsoft Surface.
I still prefer real keyboards.
Linux Surface | GitHub
"I firmly believe the Internet, and what it stood for, peaked with RSS."
I agree completely. RSS still feels like magic, the way the information you request comes shooting directly to you. No filter. No algorithm. But all stuff you asked to see.
Why I Still Use RSS | atthislink
That’s one of the wrinkles you tend to learn after spending time with the Zune Crew, most of them are lifelong audiophiles — the sort of people who get religious about terms like “lossless” and “FLAC.”
When you give certain people file format choices, they become very loyal.
I’m very particular about MP3 players, too, so this spoke to me.
A Visit from the Zune Squad | The Verge
This is weird, funny, and reassuring. My daughter loves typing into my login screen and I now see it as a security feature of fatherhood.
I hope the kids in this article got some kind of bug bounty.
Linux Mint fixes screensaver bypass discovered by two kids | ZDNet
I found Leah through a fascinating tweet where she charted out her IRC activity over the past 10 years. Leah’s setup is just as interesting, mostly in that there’s no desktop environment. Leah also helps maintain Void Linux, which is a rolling release built from scratch. It’s a little too hardcore for me, but it seems pretty beloved on Reddit. So this setup is technical and intense, but also a lot of fun.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.
Who are you, and what do you do?
Hi, I’m Leah Neukirchen. I’m a maintainer and long-time contributor to the Void Linux distribution. I wrote some popular Ruby libraries such as Rack and bacon, created the first musl-based Linux distribution Sabotage, and the mblaze suite of tools for dealing with mail, as well as a dozen other unixy utilities which you can find on my Github. When I find the time, I try to contribute to other open source projects as well.
I also publish the link blog Trivium.
I studied math and theoretical computer science, but professionally I now work as a consultant specialized on back-end, cloud, and infrastructure topics.
Why do you use Linux?
I started using Linux around 1999 when I was picking up programming and I liked that it had many of the languages I was interested in already included. I didn’t have internet on my own machine back then, so the Debian CD set was a very good investment to get a lot of software easily.
For a while, I used Apple products and OS X, as it was called back then, which was unixy enough to get along with, but later I switched back to Linux on my notebook as well, and immediately enjoyed it more, and finally could tweak all the things again.
I also use BSDs on servers occasionally, but I found Linux most suitable and convenient for use on physical machines I sit in front of.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I use Void Linux on most machines, and also have a few servers also running Debian, Arch and various BSD. Even though it’s a rolling release distribution, Void Linux has proven to be very stable as a daily driver, and in the rare cases something breaks, we are quick to fix it.
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
I don’t use a desktop environment in the typical sense of the word. I use OpenBSD’s cwm as a X11 window manager, and the majority of my windows are simply urxvt terminals. I tend to have lots of open windows, so the search function of cwm is essential to me. Most of the programs I use otherwise are GTK-based (e.g. Dino, Firefox).
I never felt a need to use a desktop environment, since my setup works very well for me, and I do most things on the command line anyway.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
I guess it’s Emacs. I edit most of the text and code I write with it, and also use it to read mail and newsgroups. It has good support for many (and even obscure) programming languages I use. However, on remote systems, I do most sysadmin-style editing with Vim.
Now and then I try other editors (lately acme, kakoune, or vis) and then I realize how many small features Emacs has that make my life a lot easier.
Second most important software is zsh, which I have extensively tweaked to my tastes.
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
I’m typing this on a Lenovo T480 which is my daily driver and work machine. It has 16GB RAM, but an empty slot left which I really should fill. Together with a Logitech MX Ergo trackball and Audio-Technica ATH-M50XBT headphones it’s the core of my current home office setup.
Other systems I use are described better on my wiki.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure.
Interview conducted January 6, 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.
Thunderbird 78 looks great. I can’t wait until there’s an upgrade path from 68.
I use Evolution for work mail, for psychological separation, but also for Exchange support, and I have to say: Thunderbird is just much easier to use, in that you can customize it into whatever you want from a client. I’m genuinely shocked people prefer web mail interfaces to something more robust, like Thunderbird.
New in Thunderbird 78.0 | Support moz://a
