Desktop Linux for Everyone
This is an interesting extension: it tiles, but in a line, so your windows are more like sliding doors. I’m a compulsive Alt-Tabber, thanks to this extension, but Julia’s workflow is interesting. It’s sort of like watching TV, but instead of channels going up and down, they go left and right.
PaperWM: tiled window management for GNOME | Julia Evans
It’s been a while since I saw a distro and wanted to try it, but Zorin Lite, which is Xfce-driven and based upon Ubuntu 18.04.3, looks very snazzy. My little netbook might be getting a new coat of operating system paint.
Zorin OS 15 Lite: Xfce Has Never Looked So Good! | OMG! Ubuntu!
A very detailed look at the Ubuntu Touch, which isn’t dead, via probono (who you might remember from this interview).
Apparently, UBports, a community project, has taken up the Ubuntu Touch software mantle. The list of devices supporting the operating system is pretty interesting.
Ubuntu Touch: reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated | Medium
I found Kezz on Twitter and I’m so glad I did because this is a wonderful interview. First of all, I love the KDE details. Because while I don’t use KDE, I respect it. I wish I could tame it the way Kezz has. Instead, I tend to bow to its will, when really, if I knew how, like Kezz, I could bend it to mine. I also appreciate the screencasting information. I don’t do it very often anymore, but I do know that at some point, there were concerns about the lack of a good Linux screencasting program. Apparently that’s no longer an issue, which is great to hear.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow me on Mastodon here and follow me on Twitter here.
I’m Kezz Bracey. My primary profession is as a web designer/front end web developer, though in recent years I’ve been focusing on teaching. I do this via courses and tutorials I create for Tuts+, though I plan to expand on this via my own site over the coming months at http://www.kezzbracey.com.
I also like to dabble a little in game development as a hobby, as well as digital art and music production.
Why do you use Linux?
I switched over to spending more time on Linux than any other operating system after waiting a few years for the promised Mac Pro update that never came. I wanted hardware that was powerful enough for my game development (and gaming) hobbies, but I also wanted a good environment for all the command line based tools that are a big part of web development today.
MacOS could give me the development environment I wanted, but with restrictive hardware. Windows could give me the hardware I wanted, but was an unpleasant environment for command line work and web development in general. So I searched for “Alternative to MacOS” and discovered ElementaryOS, which immediately captivated me. I tried it, loved it, and started transitioning over as much of my workflow as I could. I was able to then buy the hardware I wanted and have my smooth development environment, too. Since then I’ve distro-hopped quite a bit, but I still prefer every Linux distro I’ve tried over Mac or Windows as excellent web dev environments.
That said though, as much as I love Linux for practical reasons as a development environment, I also love the ethos of community-developed systems and software. When using company-driven software I sometimes run into problems stemming from what’s good for the company not being good for me, whereas I always feel confident that the goals of the people in the Linux ecosystem essentially align with my own. And I absolutely love having control over my system so I can set everything up perfectly to be a beautiful and efficient place to work.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
At the moment my main distro is Manjaro with KDE because I really enjoy the package management and the near-bleeding-edge-but-not-quite update cycle. Of all the distros I’ve tried, Manjaro provides me with what I need the most consistently.
However I also have KDE Neon on a partition at the moment, so I can use DaVinci Resolve for video editing, as it’s quite hard to get that up and running on an Arch-based system, plus I have ElementaryOS installed as there are some really interesting apps being developed for their AppCenter and I like to check in on them.
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
I use KDE and it’s my single most-loved aspect of working on Linux. As a front-end web developer, I of course love to tinker with and customize user interfaces (UIs) and that is something KDE arguably allows for the best among all desktop environments. When I hit a point of friction that’s slowing my workflow down in some way, there’s always a method to modify it in KDE. I can move around KDE so smoothly and fluidly that in comparison I feel like I’m walking through mud when I have to use Windows or MacOS, or even some other Linux desktops.
A big part of why I love KDE so much is also the Dolphin file explorer. It’s absolutely perfect for what I do thanks to the in-line terminal, excellent file previewing capability, split pane, tabs system, and toolbar controls customization. When I have to use another operating system/desktop environment, I feel Dolphin’s absence quite notably.
As an extra note, I’ve also found KDE has the best support for 4k/HiDPI and handles screen recording without producing artifacts.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
If I look at “depend upon” as meaning a piece of software I’d have to boot into Windows without, that would have to be the Figma design tool, despite it not technically being Linux software. The reason is that as wonderful as the coding side of development is on Linux, the graphics side is still challenging if you are in UI design. But the fact I can access Figma from my Linux install, (through the browser or the unofficial figma-linux app), allows me to spend more time booted into it than I would otherwise be able to.
However if we’re talking more specifically about Linux-native software made primarily for the Linux community, it would have to be SimpleScreenRecorder. I use it for screen recording my courses whenever I’m able to produce them on Linux, and it does a wonderful job of capturing high quality video with essentially no impact on performance. It’s a fantastic piece of software.
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
My main machine is an i7 processor, RX480 GPU, 16GB RAM, with a couple of SSDs.
I also have a couple of other Linux machines, though. I have an Asus Zenbook running Arch with KDE, and a handy little Surface Go running Manjaro with KDE. And if anything with a Linux kernel counts, I also have a Moto X4 running LineageOS.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure thing! Here are a couple. The first is of my straight up desktop and terminal with screenfetch, the second is of my physical desktop space, including my little Go with Manjaro tablet, and the third is with the “Grid Tiling” extension running and a few of my favorite applications.
desktop and terminal
physical work space
grid tiling
Interview conducted November 18, 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 post from David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, about switching to Windows from Apple, mostly because of not loving the new MacBook keyboards.
He reports that Windows didn’t work for him either and it made me wonder where Linux fit into his math. Over in the comments, Hansson says he’s open to trying it.
Based on his issues with Apple and Windows, I suspect Linux will be a great fit.
Back to windows after twenty years | Signal v. Noise
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
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
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 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.
