Desktop Linux for Everyone
This is a solid article about switching to Linux, but I love the quote Kev mentions, from Michael Hermann, about using Linux:
macOS is like a hotel. Everything is polished, designed and cared for. But it’s also sterile and you can’t bring your own furniture or cook your own food. On Ubuntu / Linux, you need to do the dishes and take out the trash yourself. But it’s yours. No one forces their agenda on you. It simply feels like home.
Going from macOS to Ubuntu | kvz.io
It’s a familiar problem: open-source software is widely acknowledged as crucially important in science, yet it is funded non-sustainably. Support work is often handled ad hoc by overworked graduate students and postdocs, and can lead to burnout.
This is a great article, found via Scott Nesbitt’s fantastic Monday Kickoff newsletter.
Open-source work is work. People depend upon it, yet it’s not in many institutions’ budgets. I work in a large public university system and I’m fairly certain there’s no way for us to contribute money to an unaffiliated open source project.
The article gets into all of this and it’s worth a read because a lot of people are suffering while this challenge isn’t being solved.
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Scott Nesbitt for his Eight Questions series on The Plain Text Project.
I obviously love talking plain text, so I had a blast. And Scott’s site has lots of great links, interviews, and commentary.
Eight Questions for Steven Ovadia | The Plain Text Project
I love that Sam works for OMG! Ubuntu! but uses Arch. It’s almost like a romantic comedy, although without the romance or the comedy. Regardless, I’m currently using it as the premise for my Meg Ryan comeback script. Sam’s reasons for using Linux should be familiar to all of us: the ability to see why things aren’t working and to customize your desktop experience. I also like that Sam uses the term joy when discussing Linux. Linux is fun to use and to play with. You’re getting things done and you’re learning things and it makes for an enjoyable, fulfilling experience.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.
Hi, I’m Sam! I’m a senior software engineer at NBC News where I work on editorial tools for our digital editors on the NBC News, MSNBC, and TODAY websites. I’m also the developer at OMG! Ubuntu!, working on themes, plugins, and the occasional article, over the last seven years.
Why do you use Linux?
I feel much more productive when I’m working on personal and professional projects on Linux and I have a lot of fun while I do it. All of my tools for web and desktop development feel at home on the Linux desktop more than any other platform. I’ve used macOS most of my professional career, but every release leaves me less optimistic about its future as a usable development environment. Windows Subsystem for Linux has been an interesting experiment on Windows as well, but I never feel particularly comfortable with the rest of the system.
I also enjoy being able to try out different desktop environments, themes, toolkits, and whatever else seems interesting to play around with. I’ve found perfect setups in very different environments over the years and I love being able to quickly switch between desktops and mix-and-match pieces from different parts of the Linux ecosystem without too many issues.
It’s not a perfect experience by any means, but knowing I can peek under the hood when things go wrong and that there’s a vast free and open source community creating tools for everyone to use brings me a lot of joy that no other operating system has matched.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I run Arch on my desktop. I discovered Arch, ironically, during my early work on OMG! Ubuntu! and immediately fell in love with the Arch Wiki, the extensive Arch User Repository, and the surprising stability of an always up-to-date rolling release distribution. I run Ubuntu and Debian on servers around the apartment, but I’ve used Arch almost exclusively for Linux desktops since 2014.
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
I’m currently using GNOME. I play around with other desktop environments when I get the chance though. I like the overall cohesion of my current GNOME desktop and the quality of the themes, but I had a great time with awesomeWM a few years ago and I’d love to get used to tiling window managers again, and switch to Sway full time.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
Probably htop. It’s the one thing I install anywhere I possibly can: desktops, servers, networking equipment, anything that blinks and inexplicably runs Debian. I’m a sucker for system monitoring with lots of pretty colors and htop is happy to provide it on top of easy sorting and process killing.
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
I recently built my first workstation in over a decade. I used a 24-core AMD CPU with a Radeon VII GPU. It’s a little overkill for casual work, but it’s been great for compiling larger projects and playing around with Blender on the side. It’s also my first AMD hardware and I really enjoy being able to use open source graphics drivers without sacrificing performance.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure! My desktop is usually just a grid of editors, browser windows, and terminals, but it’s nice being able to see my Firewatch-themed wallpaper every once in awhile.
Interview conducted October 19, 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.
I love how aggressively GNOME is fighting this:
“We want to send a message to all software patent trolls out there — we will fight your suit, we will win, and we will have your patent invalidated. ”
GNOME has established a patent troll defense fund, too. It’s sad that money has to go toward this, rather than toward working on their actual product. But that’s life in 2019.
This is a very funny blog post. I’d say it’s more venting than serious, but since I’m not an Apple person, I can’t really speak to that. However, I think we’ve all faced the pain of operating systems—all operating systems—that fail us for no discernible reason.
Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000 | Nibble Stew
This isn’t about Git so much as it’s about documentation, but Git (and git commit) offers the opportunity to explain what you’re doing. I always think of Memento, where the character has short-term memory issues and uses tattoos to help him remember things. A good commit message serves the same purpose, without the needles.
My favourite Git commit | fatbusinessman.com
I don’t do much in i3, customization wise. But when I do need to make changes, I usually boot into a different desktop environment. Which isn’t a huge deal. But Major Hayden shows how to do it from within i3.
Customize GNOME from i3 | major.io
I’ve played with Thunderbird and OpenPGP before and it was fairly complicated. It’s not all on Thunderbird, because keys and signatures are just difficult concepts for many of us. But hopefully it’ll be at least slightly easier for people like me to configure encryption in Thunderbird 78.
Thunderbird, Enigmail and OpenPGP | The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog
I don’t understand containers, although I know they’re a good thing. And I know the name Docker, but I didn’t realize they were in trouble. I also didn’t realize they were so disliked in the free and open source software community.
So yeah. Business, huh?
Docker is in deep trouble | ZDNet
