Desktop Linux for Everyone
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
I found Yorick through the amazing Lobsters thread asking what software people use daily. I’m glad I reached out to Yorick for a few reasons. One is the love for Cinnamon. I use it on my older Linux Mint laptop and it’s a great environment (although I wish it had better built-in file searching). Another is the focus on the hardware. There’s a lot of great ergonomic details in here. And finally, I appreciate his enthusiasm for BSD. I’m not there yet either, but like Yorick, perhaps some day.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.
I am Yorick Peterse. I am a staff software engineer at GitLab, which is basically one level above a senior engineer. For the first few years at GitLab I focused on improving performance, but these days I focus on making it easier to ship code and release new versions of GitLab.
Outside of the work I do for GitLab, I work on a programming language called Inko. In the past I worked on a variety of mostly Ruby-based free software projects, such as Rubinius, Pry, and Oga, an XML/HTML parser for Ruby that I created a few years ago.
I also contributed to various other projects over the years, though most of these contributions were either small code changes, or bug reports.
I have been using Linux for over 15 years now, though for a while my main system of choice was a MacBook. I like and use Linux for the usual reasons: it’s free software, supports a wide array of devices, etc. I learned about Linux in the early 2000s when I was a teenager. We didn’t have a lot of money, and the computers we had were a bit dated at the time, and not really capable of running recent versions of Windows. Linux on the other hand ran just fine. I think one of the first versions of Linux I used was some old version of SUSE, followed by an early version of Ubuntu. After that I used a MacBook for a while, before switching to using Linux as my daily driver.
I would like to one day be able to use BSD, as from the outside they seem a bit better designed and built compared to Linux. Dragonfly BSD in particular looks really interesting. Sadly, even FreeBSD (probably the most popular BSD today, if you exclude macOS) still has issues with certain setups. WiFi support in particular is a bit of a hit or miss, from what I found. While it gets better every day, I think the BSDs are still 5-10 years behind Linux when it comes to support and ease of use.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I use Arch Linux on both my laptop and desktop. I think I have been using Arch for about seven years now. Arch Linux gives you a reasonable amount of flexibility, but without making it difficult to get a system up and running. With that said, I don’t feel very strongly about the choice of distribution; I just use whatever works best for me.
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
I currently use Cinnamon, and before that I used Xfce for many years. I moved away from Xfce because at the time it did not support HiDPI displays. It was also a bit clunky here and there. I like Cinnamon because it’s more lightweight compared to GNOME and KDE, while still offering the features that I need.
I have played with Plasma, Sway, and a few other desktop environments over the years, but I keep coming back to Cinnamon.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
(Neo)Vim. I have been a Vim user for 10 years now, and I can not live without it. Besides using it to write code, I also use it for composing emails, taking notes, and managing my personal Wiki; basically anything that involves working with text. I suppose that after all these years I still have not learned how to exit Vim 😉
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
I have two computers running Linux: a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 3rd generation, and a desktop computer. The desktop comes with an AMD Ryzen 1600X, 8GB DDR4 RAM, and 250GB SSD storage. The disk is encrypted using LUKS. For the GPU I use a cheap Radeon RX 550.
My keyboard is an Ergodox Ez, using a modified version of the Colemak layout. Before that I was using a HHKB Pro 2. I switched to the Ergodox as regular keyboards give me serious wrist pain after about an hour or so of use. Learning both a new keyboard and layout has so far taken several months, but it was definitely worth the trouble. For the laptop I just use the built-in QWERTY keyboard, as there is no nice way of getting my custom layout to work on it.
My mouse is a Logitech MX Ergo trackball. I have used regular mice, vertical mice, and various trackballs over the years. The MR Ergo is so far the best mouse I have used. I tried some of the big trackballs, but they push my wrist in an awkward position; causing serious pain after only a few hours of use.
Both computers run the same software. I mostly use my desktop, only using the laptop when I am traveling, or just don’t feel like sitting behind a desk in the evening.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Yes! It is attached. I have also included a photo of my physical desktop environment.
Interview conducted September 25, 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.
This is a great thread from Lobsters, a really interesting tech-focused message board. There’s a lot of wonderful Linux action in it. You’ll see some fruits from this thread tomorrow.
What software do you use daily? | Lobsters
