The Linux Setup – Daniel Stenberg, cURL Maintainer

May 8, 2019

I never think about where Unix commands come from. They’re just there. But, obviously, people make them. I recently learned about Daniel Stenberg, the creator and maintainer of cURL, via reddit (Daniel codes live on Twitch)!. Daniel has a great workflow, that, in essence, is about making things as easy as possible for himself. It’s a great lesson. It’s not about what’s the best tool, but what’s the best tool that lets you do what you need to do. Because while there are always better tools, we don’t always need our own tools to be better.

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?

    Hello. I’m Daniel Stenberg. I’m probably most known to most people as the founder and lead developer of the cURL project. I’ve been working on open source since the mid 90s and I’ve been writing code since the mid 80s.

    I write code most of my work days and during a lot of my spare time as well. I’m employed by wolfSSL and I work on cURL. I work from home. During an average year, I do about 8 million keypresses on my keyboard.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    I’ve been using Linux primarily since the 90s. I prefer Linux to other platforms because it makes me the most productive; it provides me with all the knobs and tweaks I like to customize my working environment and make it act and behave exactly the way I want it to, with the least problems.

    I’m a developer. I develop code on my computers as the primary use case. I need my terminals, text editors, debuggers and related developer tools. My programming language of choice is usually C and the editor of my choice is usually Emacs. I run plain old bash.

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

    My main machines always run Debian sid/unstable. I’m familiar with Debian and I like Debian technically, as well as the policies and ideas behind it. I like using “unstable” so that I always have recent versions of the dependencies I develop with, and I like never having to install new versions (unless I upgrade to a new machine). I just gradually upgrade the machines every so often.

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

    I’m a KDE Plasma user. I’ve just casually tried through a few different environments and I finally ended up on this, as I found it to have the least number of obstacles and the highest degree of satisfaction. I don’t consider myself a very picky user when it comes to my desktop environment. This just happens to work very well for me and I rarely try out other things now, as I’m content and I save time by not chasing a dream of a perfect DE that possibly could do a few minor things even better.

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

    I think I would pick Emacs. Out of all the software I run today, only Emacs has been with me since the early 90s. It’s a tool I’ve grown used to and learned all the quirks of. It’s customized to work the way I like it, while providing all of the necessary features someone like me needs.

    Being a productive developer is largely about being familiar with and master of your tools. I prefer to stick to the Emacs I know, rather than the possibly-also-decent editor alternatives that exist. I’d rather spend that potential research time on development. Perhaps one day I learn about some grand and fancy feature Emacs lacks, that something else offers, that makes me consider it worth trying something else. That day has not happened in the last few decades.

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

    My two primary machines both run Linux.

    The primary desktop machine is a 32GB RAM Core-i7 3770K (3.5GHz) machine featuring two screens (24″ and 27″). Not the latest and greatest CPU wise, but still speedy enough to do most jobs I need it to do quickly enough.

    The primary laptop is a 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD Lenovo T470S. It’s 14″. Perfect to carry around with me to conferences and speaking opportunities.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    This is a dual-screen screenshot that’s three years old but it could just as well has been taken recently. I typically have HexChat, two-to-three terminal windows, one-to-three Emacs windows and two-to-three Firefox windows (with something around 10-15 tabs in each) up on the two screens. That’s it. Oh, and I never run apps full-screen.

    As a little bonus, I could mention that the background images on my desktop are done by the Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag—only really properly visible when I lock the screens.

Interview conducted May 5, 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.

Why I left Ulysses

May 7, 2019

I know this is preaching to the choir, but this post, about the challenge of using a proprietary editor on a proprietary system, reminded me of why I love Linux. I pick the tools and mix-and-match those tools as I see fit. If something doesn’t work, I find something else. It makes it easy to focus on work. But also, it just saves me so much time and energy.

Why I left Ulysses | BryceWray.com

25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

May 2, 2019

I’m disappointed this interview doesn’t address Linus’s behavior issues, which resulted in a one-month time out. Especially since Linus gives a solid opening:

But, I absolutely detest modern “social media”—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It’s a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior.

I think part of it is something that email shares too, and that I’ve said before: “On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle”. When you’re not talking to somebody face to face, and you miss all the normal social cues, it’s easy to miss humor and sarcasm, but it’s also very easy to overlook the reaction of the recipient, so you get things like flame wars, etc., that might not happen as easily with face-to-face interaction.

It seems like some lessons were learned, but I would have liked to have read more about his take on the experience.

25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds | Linux Journal

Image courtesy of Faces of Open Source / Peter Adams

Mastodon 2.8.0 preview (and other things)

April 30, 2019

I enjoy Mastodon and remain hopeful it’ll one day become more of a viable alternative to Twitter. Gargron, who runs the project, had an interesting post on his Patreon page:

In January, Mastodon received a $70,000 grant from Samsung NEXT over the transparent crowdfunding platform OpenCollective–that is, OpenCollective is the entity that holds the grant, anyone can request a payout by submitting an expense receipt or an invoice, and I get to decide whether that request will be fulfilled, with all such transactions being viewable by everyone. The purpose of the grant is attracting more developers and other outside help to Mastodon. Whoever contributes to Mastodon with code or translations can get compensated for their time. My own wage, as well as mastodon.social operating costs, remain dependent on this Patreon.

I hadn’t heard of OpenCollective but it looks very interesting. And it makes it easy to see how money is spent within a project, which is always a good thing.

Mastodon 2.8.0 preview (and other things) | Gargron on Patreon

Linux Mint’s Sobering Update: A Rare Glimpse Into The Personal Struggles Developers Face

April 23, 2019

Jason Evangelho deserves credit for reading the monthly Linux Mint updates and unearthing the angst in it. Running a distribution is a huge endeavor, but it’s also thankless, and it seems like the Mint team is feeling that pain.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has more on this, with some interesting quotes from reddit, too.

I try never to hate on any distros, because I can’t even imagine how hard a job it is. Now I’m thinking I should be more proactively kind. Especially to Mint, which I use (and love) on my ThinkPad.

Linux Mint’s Sobering Update: A Rare Glimpse Into The Personal Struggles Developers Face | Forbes

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