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

Why I Can’t Stop Wasting Money on Subscriptions I Never Use, According to Experts

March 21, 2019

The thing that struck me about this is having to subscribe to Adobe on the off-chance you’ll need it. I’m not opposed to paying for software, and in fact think we should pay for software we value, but I also think at some point, you should be allowed to stop paying. It shouldn’t be a lifetime commitment. So if you know anyone paying for Adobe because they might need it, maybe suggest they explore some free and open source alternatives, that should do the job just fine.

(link via Kara Cutruzzula’s awesome Brass Ring (Daily))

Why I Can’t Stop Wasting Money on Subscriptions I Never Use, According to Experts | Money

The Linux Setup – Tom Ray, Lorenzo’s Music

March 20, 2019

I found Tom via this Forbes piece about the band. The knock on Linux has always been that it’s tough for music and video work, but I hear/read that less-and-less often. As Tom points out a few times, Linux has come a long way. I also related to his comments about tweaking and changing distributions. Like Tom, I’ve discovered it’s not a great use of my time. Once I find something that works for me, I stick with with until EOL.

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 Tom Ray and I’m the singer for the band Lorenzo’s Music, an art rock band from Madison, Wisconsin. We release all of our music under a Creative Commons license, so it’s free to use for video or to remix or build upon.

    We also just recently launched a new podcast on the website called the Lorenzo’s Music Podcast, a show where we talk with other musicians and creators from around the world to learn about what they do and why they do it.

    Why do you use Linux?

    I got interested in Linux back when Ubuntu first came out. Sort of. I started testing it out during the Breezy Badger release back in 2005.

    I used to use a bunch of proprietary software for artwork and I heard about this operating system that had all of this open source software built into it and I was curious. So I tried it out. I dual-booted for several years and realized that I was using my Windows partition less and less. Then one day I was updating to a new version and accidentally did a full install. I wiped my Widows partition completely. So I just decided, ‘okay, I’m just going to use Linux now!’

    But really, at that point, I was finding programs that did mostly what I wanted on Linux. My main problem, though, was that video and audio creation programs were all still pretty buggy early on. But over the years that has changed. A lot!

    So this year, to prove that it could be done, my band created our current release Rom-Comm Mixtape, using only open source tools and software from beginning to end. That includes recording, mixing, mastering, artwork, videos…everything. And we were pretty happy with the process. As I said, it’s really changed over the years with what you can do.

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

    I currently run the latest version of Ubuntu Studio, 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish. Over the years I’ve tried a lot of other distros: Fedora, Arch, Debian, Mint. I even used to dabble with the Eeepc back when that was a thing. I used to trick out the way the distros looked and all of that stuff, too. But after a while, I found that I was spending so much time setting it up for what I wanted it to do, or what I needed, that I was wasting a lot of time.

    So I just chose a distro that had all of that stuff set up for me, which was Ubuntu Studio. It had the programs I needed already built-in. And JACK and the low-latency kernel were already set up, so I could just start creating.

    Plus, with the live distro, I was able to set up USB sticks for each of the guys in the band. That way we could create stuff on our own time and they wouldn’t have to learn how to set things up. I could just show them the programs we use and they boot it up.

    We share the Ardour song files (the multi-tracking software that we use) in a GitHub repository. We upload the changes we make there and then all of us can pull the latest version from GitHub.

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

    Whatever comes with the latest version of Ubuntu Studio. Xfce, I think? Like I said, I don’t really mess around with the set-up that much anymore! Haha!

    EDITOR’S NOTE: Yup!. It’s Xfce.

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

    Ardour. After the process of working on the recent mixtape, it’s really just become what we use to create and record. I also use it for editing the podcasts.

    Oh, and I guess the one hidden gem is Audacity, for audio noise removal. I record a lot of the podcast in public places and the noise removal feature in Audacity is still one of the best-hidden secrets to anyone that is recording a podcast. I hear about people recording shows under a blanket or in a closet to reduce noise. I’ve found the noise removal in Audacity is the perfect alternative to all of that.

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

    I got a laptop from System76 last year, the Lemur version they released. I don’t even think it’s available anymore so I can’t remember everything it has on it. It’s fine. I got the one that was the cheapest. It had enough memory for me to run stuff, which was all I was interested in. I can add stuff if I need to, but never really do.

  6. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    I can share a screenshot but it’s pretty dull. I just use the default set up. Haha!

    I would just like to add that I actually reached out to the Ubuntu Studio team to see if I could talk to one of them on the Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. So in the next few weeks, I’ll be doing an interview with the team lead for the Ubuntu Studio project, Erich Eickmeyer.

    EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s up!

Interview conducted December 4, 2018

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.

Darter Pro Review

March 19, 2019

I’m always curious about System 76 laptops. The Darter Pro is getting a lot of positive reviews. I no longer use a laptop at home, and I’m more of a ThinkPad person. Plus, my wife has a Dell XPS 11 that looks pretty sweet. I’m kind of glad I don’t have to make any decisions right now.

Darter Pro Review | dominickm.com

The Linux Setup – Craig Nuzzo, Two Tech Dudes

March 13, 2019

Craig’s Linux journey is similar to mine. Windows fails, you’re frustrated, you jump on Linux, and you never leave. I also enjoy Craig’s points about the teaching and learning potential of Linux. As he points out, many education programs use the Linux kernel for pedagogical purposes, which is amazing. You’re not only making software that powers so much of our technology, but you’re using that same software to teach more developers? And improving the code base as it happens? That’s powerful. Also, Craig reached out through the contact form. You should, too!

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here (for now…) and follow me on Twitter here.

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

    My name is Craig Nuzzo and I am a professional and hobbyist Linux user, engineer, and admin. I work on a small Systems Engineering team at a start-up-gone-enterprise that develops websites and solutions for automotive dealerships around the world. We are hiring and offer remote work so check out our career page.

    I also host a podcast covering various tech related topics, like Linux, security, and programming. I just try to simplify all the noise out there and it helps me think as well. Being an INTJ, it helps to get out of my comfort zone a bit too. The best place to follow us is in on Twitter.

    I keep up on alternative technologies that give power back to the people and not to corporations. I enjoy learning how the tech works from a top-level as well as under the hood.

    In my free time I enjoy weightlifting, playing basketball, singing, cinema, watching hockey, football, & baseball, going to concerts, listening to metalcore music, and keeping up with the latest Linux/other security-related news.

    Check out my Now page to see what I am currently up to.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    TL;DR: Because it is fun. Because it is innovative. Because it is open. Because the knowledge pays the bills.

    I had purchased a new laptop for myself after graduating from college back in 2007. I was regretfully and naively a marketing major, but always interested in computers. I just needed that hardware upgrade. I had used the same Toshiba Satellite laptop all four years of college and the CPU on that thing was just not keeping up with new software and all the Google Chrome threads that I concurrently ran. So I went out and bought an Asus U43F laptop. I absolutely loved. It ran the new Microsoft Windows 7 and everything was fantastic. I replaced all my Windows programs with mostly open-source ones, even found a nice little utility to help me out when I did frequent system restores to keep it clean, which was Ninite. That was until the BSODs (Blue Screen of Deaths). They would appear out of nowhere. I could not figure out how to fix them. Based on initial research, it appeared to be some sort of swap space error, but who knows; “DDL Hell” could have been a culprit as well. I tried numerous system restores, kept my memory footprint at a minimum, but nothing. That did nothing. Until one day…

    …I got in.

    I believe it was just after my first computer programming language course: Visual Basic or maybe Java. I just woke up, downloaded an ISO of Linux Mint, installed it completely over Windows, and never looked back. Not only was my U43F laptop seemingly five to ten times faster at everything it computed, I didn’t have one BSOD or any other hardware issue ever again on my U43F.

    I always had replaced the proprietary applications with open-source ones, so why not the kernel!

    Linux is a great way to learn computer science-related skills and theory because all the code is open-source, which can be viewed over at Kernel.org. Linux is used in many institutional curricula.

    The operating system should be well-organized, use memory efficiently, and give the control necessary to run on most hardware. I believe that an operating system is meant to get the most out of the hardware. To me, the OS is more important than the hardware. I can grab an old laptop and throw a Linux distribution on there and get it up and running. At this point in time, my current operating system criteria belongs to the Linux-based ones.

    Besides the technology itself, Linux also has a very innovative and creative community. Sure, sometimes things may get heated and people may not agree on things (i.e. systemd vs traditional init). But, at the end of the day, we are all interested in one common goal: to provide an awesome operating system for our computers. We use Linux to make all types of computing devices.

    The above paragraphs have modified and taken from my blog posts over at and . Check them out for more details.

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

    Ubuntu 18.04. I’ve distro-hopped around for many years, mostly for fun. Yet I still go back to Ubuntu just because it works very well and the community is massive. I keep it simple. Depending on the direction of Canonical in the near future regarding being a publicly-traded company, I may end up on something like Solus or Arch.

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

    GNOME. It’s the Ubuntu default now and looks slick. It was a toss-up between that and KDE, but I feel like GNOME has a great direction and works very well. Not that KDE doesn’t, but it’s a Pepsi/Coke thing now, which is fantastic to see. The direct competition is making each desktop environment better.

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

    Audacity. I’m not sure how else I would edit my podcast or my singing voice.

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

    A System 76 Ratel Pro desktop (discontinued model), with Intel i5-6600 3.9GHz and 32GB RAM. It’s a beauty.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Absolutely!

Interview conducted December 3, 2018

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 Linux Rig on Google+ here, follow me on Twitter here, and subscribe to the feed here.

The Linux Setup – probono, AppImage

March 6, 2019

I’ve never seen a setup like Simon’s. I love the Zen of it. There’s no attachment to a distribution. It’s just whatever is felt in the moment. I found Simon via this post on Linux usability. I don’t necessarily agree that the original Mac was the gold usability standard, but there’s definitely room for most, if not all, desktop environments to improve, Linux and otherwise. Something is always at least slightly broken. But what fun is a system that doesn’t sometimes drive you a little crazy?

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.

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

    My name is Simon, but I’m probably better known as probono in the Linux world. An early Mac user converted to Linux, I’ve been trying to help make desktop Linux more like the Mac over the last few years, starting with the klik project over a decade ago, and with what is now named AppImage. AppImage is, basically, a self-mounting filesystem that contains an application and its resources, not unlike an .app inside a .dmg on the Mac. The advantage is that you get “one app = one file,” which you can easily handle without a package manager. And the applications run on most desktop Linux systems.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    Linux allows me to decouple the operating system from the hardware, and the applications from the operating system. Which allows me to mix and match the three. To allow for this, I am running a quite unusual setup: I keep hundreds of different Linux distributions (and versions) as live ISO files on a bootable SSD using SystemImageKit, and all of my applications in AppImage format. This means I can just walk to just about any machine, plug-in and boot from my SSD into any of the Linux distributions, and use just about every application. This makes for a great setup to reproduce and debug issues. I also like this setup because using live ISOs means you have a “factory new” setup each time you boot (also known as “stateless”). Furthermore, OS updates are trivial and can be done within seconds.

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

    Every time I boot my machine, SystemImageKit shows me hundreds of live ISOs to choose from.

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

    None comes even close to the original Macintosh user experience so far, but on the Linux desktop I currently run Xfce most of the time, because it stays mostly true to the desktop metaphor. From time to time it still drives me crazy. I’ve written a six-part series of articles about Linux usability and why we as a community still have a lot to learn and improve.

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

    The web browser, because I practically live in it.

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

    A Dell tower from a decade ago with lots of RAM. An Acer mini PC from a couple of years ago. Some Retina Macs. A cheap Acer netbook-type notebook for travel. And a couple of self-built boxes.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    There is not one desktop I could share—I make a point of booting into various, different live ISOs and checking out their desktops. So I’ll share this screenshot from my boot menu instead:

Interview conducted December 2, 2018

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 Linux Rig on Google+ here, follow me on Twitter here, and subscribe to the feed here.