Desktop Linux for Everyone
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
I don’t take advantage of i3’s tiling, keeping most windows full, since I use i3 on a netbook. But I know from reddit that users are very interested in the floating aspect of i3, too. Major Hayden has a great tutorial on the topic.
Automatic floating windows in i3 | major.io
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
The web browser, because I practically live in it.
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.
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.
James reached out to me through the contact form and I’m so grateful! When I looked at James’ screenshot, I thought ‘That looks like CrunchBang! So it’s nice to see the design aesthetic of that distribution living on. I’m also glad that James, who works in cyber security, says Linux is relatively secure. Like James says, you can never take security for granted, but all things being equal, it’s nice to use something that’s relatively tough to compromise.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.
My name is James Permenter, all-around Unix geek, tinkerer, and programmer. By day I work for a cyber security company called PhishLabs as a Linux systems/infrastructure engineer and by night I can be found hacking away on embedded systems, firmware, playing with kernels and learning anything and everything I can for fun and profit.
Why do you use Linux?
I started using Linux as a teenager after meeting a group of people online who, like me, were interested in writing bots for the popular point-and-click game Runescape. I was walked through how to install Mandriva and the painful Java setup, and began working on automating my leveling efforts via a package called xautomation. After that, I branched out and started learning all I could about this OS, and I became hooked.
Linux for me was, and still is, this giant box of Legos that allows me to build essentially anything I want; it’s total freedom. I’ve been fortunate enough to have built my career around the knowledge and skills gained by having fun all these years and have used a Linux operating system for work and play ever since.
As a security professional I should also point out that while no system is 100% secure, the fine people that work on Linux make it a huge priority to patch vulnerabilities before just about anyone, and the community puts a lot of care into the overall security of its systems, definitely a contributing factor to my using it.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I’ve been a distro hopper for years but for some time now I’ve been using a Debian derivative called BunsenLabs, which is a fork of the now-defunct CrunchBang distribution that I started with originally.
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
I use Xfce with Openbox and tint2 on top which is the default configuration for BunsenLabs. Despite having relatively beefy specs on my machines, I’m very stingy with my computing resources and love simplistic, lightweight distrubutions. I get queasy around systems that use around 1GB RAM or more to run at idle.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
Just one is tough but I’d have to hands down say Vi(m) with various development plugins:
No matter if I’m editing a configuration file, making task lists, writing shell scripts, or building software, it’s usually done in Vim. Vim is very lightweight, and ships with nearly every *nix distro out there.
While not all solely Linux software, I’m also a big fan of Firefox containers, KeepassX, Fishshell, radare2, avrdude, ARM GNU toolchain, Clonezilla, Krita, FreeCAD, Conky, and too many more to list.
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
I spend most of my time on my ThinkPad T450s with Intel i7-5600U (4) @ 3.2GHz and 12GB RAM.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Absolutely!
Interview conducted November 16, 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.
This is a great post from Aurynn Shaw. I love this line:
The best advice we give programmers is to leave things better than how they started. We do it with code, why don’t we do it with communities? Why don’t we do it with people, colleagues, friends?
I found it via this MetaFilter thread about systemd. I one day hope to have an opinion about systemd. But not today.
Contempt Culture | The Particular Finest
John’s enthusiasm comes through clearly here. John is an Apple refugee who really appreciates the Linux life. I love all of the photography stuff John handles with Linux. I’m not much of a photo person, but my sense of things is that Linux is handling serious photo work better and better. It’s great to hear that confirmed. And just as a reminder, John contacted me through the web form. If you’d like to be interviewed, please drop me a line. I love hearing from people!
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.
Hi there! My name is John Been. I live, together with my wife and our cat, in a small city in the north of the Netherlands. In 1997 my wife and I both completed our masters Business Economics at the VU University of Amsterdam, where I specialized in Administrative Information Science, the IT side of business administration. At the moment I work as a senior development engineer for a large financial institution where I am involved in translating requirements into working IT solutions. But in this interview for “The Linux Setup” I will not focus on my professional life, because we hardly use open source software there, although it is getting a bit better. I’d rather focus on using Linux and open source software for my personal projects, my Linux-oriented website www.reallinuxuser.com and the book that I am writing with the working title Linux for Humans. In addition to my interest in everything related to information technology, I am also passionate about landscape photography, writing, drawing, learning, web development, video editing, and integrating this with my interest in Linux and open source software.
Why do you use Linux?
I have not always been a Linux user. I switched to using Linux as my daily driver only a few years ago. Before that I had been a very satisfied user of the OS X (now macOS) operating system for more than 10 years. But due to increasing hardware issues with my iMac, and the fact that my loyal-but-old MacBook was no longer supported by Apple, I looked for something different. I did not want to invest again in a new, inflexible integrated iMac and the Apple ecosystem with correspondingly high prices. And because I felt a bit adventurous at that moment, I decided to build my own Linux workstation. I also replaced OS X on my old-but-technically-still-working MacBook with Linux. Both systems were running Linux Mint and from that moment on I couldn’t have been happier. That migration to Linux on my MacBook and my new workstation opened my eyes for what is possible with Linux and open source software. I experienced the speed, flexibility and stability of Linux. I experienced the fantastic diversity of powerful open source software solutions. I experienced the willingness of the Linux community to help others. And I experienced the new journey of discovery that revived my old passion for computers and software.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I like to have separate systems for different goals. For my serious personal projects, such as my landscape photography, my Linux website, my web design, my study and my book-in-progress for people who just want to be productive with Linux, I prefer stable machines. On these production machines, a custom-build Intel i7 desktop and a Dell Latitude E7450 laptop, I run Linux Mint 19 with the Cinnamon desktop environment. Lots of people in the Linux community say that Linux Mint is good for beginners, but in my opinion it is also great for power users that are less interested in the technology but more in the stability and out-of-the-box experience and that runs their software flawlessly. On the other hand, for creating my articles for my website, I try out lots of open source software solutions and different Linux distributions. Because of this changing of distributions, software and settings can sometimes lead to an unstable or crashing system. For this reason, I prefer to experiment on separate machines. For these experiments I use an old Core 2 Duo Dell Precision T3400 and my previously-described old MacBook, on which I do a lot of distro hopping and installation and removal of software. Currently this Dell precision runs Elementary OS and the MacBook runs Deepin and despite their age they run surprisingly well.
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
It is not possible to choose one single Linux distribution and one single desktop environment that is best for every user. That is why I like it that there are so many different options for different kinds of users and situations. We are all different, so having the freedom to choose is great, but can also make things difficult for beginners. On my website and in my upcoming book I try to distinguish between a number of personas, and see which desktop environment fits them best, like the eye candy lover, the macOS switcher, the Windows switcher, the minimalist, the tweaker and the practical user. For my production machines I consider myself the practical user and I think the Cinnamon desktop is the best fit for that. On these machines I don’t do a lot of tinkering. These machines must help me to be productive and that’s what Linux Mint Cinnamon is doing for me. But on my other machines, I like to try new things and I must say that I like the beauty of the Deepin desktop environment.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
Landscape photography is my passion. In my Apple days I relied on Adobe Lightroom for my photography workflow. Now as a Linux and open source lover, I don’t have Lightroom at my disposal, but when it comes to image editing under Linux, I am not disappointed. A surprisingly large number of high quality RAW editors are available for Linux, such as RAWTherapee, GTKRAWgallery and Lightzone. But anyone who appreciates a clear and professional workflow for importing, rating, editing, synchronizing, presenting, printing and exporting, can hardly ignore the application Darktable, being color managed, offering a smart and professional setup, and providing an enormous range of high-quality development modules. In my opinion Darktable is a must-have in your serious or professional photography workflow. But for my website and book I use a lot of other tools as well. LibreOffice and GIMP are very important, but the simple-but-feature-rich screenshot application Shutter is indispensable. And my love for the Vivaldi browser is growing.
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
As said before, I have not always been a Linux user. I only started using Linux a few years ago after I had been a very satisfied user of the Apple ecosystem for more than a decade. But due to increasing hardware issues I looked for something different. So I decided to custom build a relatively powerful Core i7 16GB Linux workstation with a simple GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB dedicated graphics card. The system has a 250GB Samsung EVO SSD internal drive for the operating system and internal data drives of 1, 2 and 4TB. Further there is a 3TB external drive for my photos, a RAIDON 2-bay 3TB RAID 1 system for my backups and a Synology DS216J Network Attached Storage Device. I also use a Dell Latitude E7450 Core i5 laptop with 16GB RAM, a Dell Precision T3400 Core 2 Duo workstation with 6GB RAM, and a MacBook Core 2 Duo Late 2008 laptop with 4GB RAM.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Yes of course! Here is my Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop with my favorite application, Darktable, showing one of my landscape photographs created in my favorite country, Iceland.
Interview conducted November 15, 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.
It’s always cool to see things like this iterate in public.
Fedora logo redesign update | Máirín Duffy
Kev uses the phrase “Linux pragmatist” as a shorthand for people who like Linux as a tool, but are perhaps less interested in the politics of free and open source software. I often wonder where I fit in on that scale. I love the openness of Linux, but I use it because it works so well for me. I love the philosophy of Linux but it’s also an amazing piece of technology. I suppose Kev’s point is that Linux works on a few levels.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.
My name is Kev Quirk and I am a cyber security professional from the UK. I’m currently working as a Cyber Security Incident Response Lead for a global financial institution. Aside from this, I’m a lover of animals, motorbikes and of course, Linux/FOSS.
Why do you use Linux?
I’ve been using Linux for around 10 years now. The first distro I installed was Ubuntu 08.04 Hardy Heron. I originally started using Linux out of nothing more than interest. I was pretty good with Windows, and was working as a Windows server admin at the time, so I wanted to learn something new. It was only later that a lot of the advantages of open source became clear—when I first started, I didn’t even know what free and open source software was.
I would class myself as a Linux pragmatist, rather than a Linux idealist. I use Linux because the workflow better suits my needs. I love the flexibility that the OS provides. The community, openness and lack of malware is a bonus. 🙂
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I’m currently running Ubuntu MATE 18.04.
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
I’ve always loved the GNOME 2 workflow, so when GNOME went to version 3, I lost my way a little. From there I tried Unity, Cinnamon, Xfce, Elementary, Budgie, and many more. None really worked for me, so I actually went back to Windows for a while. I did try MATE, but I initially felt it wasn’t a mature product. I did always keep a Linux partition on my machines, but Windows tended to be my go-to OS for a period of time.
Anyway, fast forward a couple of years and I replaced Windows 10 with Ubuntu MATE 16.04 and never looked back. It was perfect. So I’ve been blissfully using Ubuntu MATE ever since.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
I conciously try not to be dependant on one particular piece of software, but if I had to pick, I’d say Firefox. Most things can be accomplished in a good web browser these days. Webmail, no problem. For document editing you can use Zoho docs, or Google if you’re inclined that way (although LibreOffice is my preference if it’s available).
Aside from Firefox, I would say the applications I use the most would be a text editor (in my case Pluma), the terminal, and Inkscape/GIMP (I enjoy graphic design as a hobby). My needs are pretty simple, which allows me to have a lot of freedom over which distro/OS I use. Although, I’m not much of a distro-hopper these days.
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
I have two main machines. My laptop (which is my daily driver) is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. It’s an awesome bit of kit that works superbly well with Linux. It’s a Core i7 with 8GB RAM, Intel 4400 GPU and a 256GB SSD.
My desktop is a custom-built jobby that I tend to use more for graphical stuff, as it has my WACOM tablet plugged in to it. That machine has an AMD FX-6300, a Radeon RX 560, 16GB RAM, a 128GB SSD for my OS and a 1TB HDD for data. It’s no powerhouse by modern standards, but it’s great for my needs.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
Sure. Attached is a screenshot from my ThinkPad (my desktop UI is exactly the same). It’s Ubuntu MATE 18.04 with the Apapta GTK theme, Papirus icon theme and a Plank dock. The background image is my own little homage to the man himself: Linus Torvalds.
Interview conducted July 31, 2018; desktop screenshot updated February 7, 2019, at request of subject
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.
These switch stories are no longer super surprising. But I do see a lot of people talking up i3 lately. I use it on an old netbook and it’s great. I think it would be hilarious if i3 wound up the one desktop to rule them all.
So Long, MacBook. Hello Again, Linux. | Richard Mavis dot info
Jose gives a wonderfully thorough tour of his setup, even explaining all of his choices. It’s a great read. Like I thought I dislike using the mouse to do anything, but Jose’s taken things to another level with his complete rejection of it. I also appreciated everything he said about wanting to control his machine. It’s such a weird thing that so many of us spend so much time at work using a computer, yet we can’t customize it in ways that make our work easier. Unless you’re lucky enough to work in a Linux shop, that is.
You can find more of The Linux Setup here.
You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.
My name is Jose. I’m software engineer living in Brooklyn, NY. I consult on web apps and websites for a variety of different industries. I’ve been using Linux for about 17 years.
Why do you use Linux?
In the nineties, I wanted to learn C/C++. Visual Studio and a decent compiler cost like $600. A programmer friend of mine told me I could just use Vim and gcc and handed me a stack of floppies with Linux on it. I immediately decimated my parent’s Windows 95 machine, and after about 10 tries, I had my first working Linux box. Sort of. I mean, sound, ethernet, or X didn’t work, but I was running Linux, right? I spent the next couple of months figuring out how to get that stuff to work. I never learned C very well, but I’ve been hooked on Linux ever since.
These days, Linux just works for me. On my desktop and on the servers I work with.
As someone who is on the computer anywhere from 8-12 hours any given day, I want complete control over my machine. I use Linux because it’s the only environment that allows me to configure it to look and behave precisely as I want. Windows or OS X don’t even come close.
A small but important example: I have a certain directory of images that become my desktop wallpaper every five minutes, except on the eighth workspace where it’s always the same minimal wallpaper and also prints a ton of system statistics (but only on that workspace). I type Mod+8 (“Mod” is the Windows or command key) to get to that workspace. My hands never leave home row. That’s basically impossible to achieve on any other OS. I achieve this with roughly 10 lines of script.
At work, I’m forced to use a Mac a lot. I’m not a Mac hater but it’s hard to describe what I love about Linux without mentioning what I find frustrating about other systems. There’s so much about the default OS X environment that just gets in my way. It usually takes me most of an entire workday (if I have admin access) to shut off all the default settings one is supposed to love MacOS for.
A few:
I don’t want to tap to click. Or any other trackpad gestures to open up mission control or space command or anything else! I want that off by default!
These are all choices that Apple makes for you and they drive me nuts. And you can’t actually remove the damn dock, I basically have to hack it so it takes ten minutes to show on hover.
On Linux, I just start with a window manager that has the default configuration that I want and I have dozens if not hundreds to choose from. If I don’t like the way they are set up, I just fix it myself, because I have clear, documented access to the actual code. Better yet, I can just use one of the thousands of scripts written by the community. Changing some of these things on other OSes is often nearly impossible.
What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
My first distro was Caldera OpenLinux in 2001, much to my parent’s chagrin. I distro-hopped for several years (Slackware, Mandrake, Debian, Ubuntu for about five years). I settled on ArchLinux about six years ago. I love Arch because it’s simple and clean and gets out of my way so that I can have the exact experience that I want. The community is tremendous and the distro is just hard enough to use that, in my humble opinion, it removes some of the noise from the community forums.
What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?
I’ve used GNOME, Enlightenment, Xfce and half dozen others over the years. Then I discovered tiling window managers about the same time I switched to Arch. I used AwesomeWM for about a year before I found i3. I’ve been using that ever since.
What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?
The software I use the most is available on other operating systems: Vim/Emacs (I use them both, don’t ask), Chrome/Firefox, RoxTerm, Git, Tmux, and VirtualBox.
As I mentioned, I’m forced to use a Mac at work more often than not. i3 is the one piece of software I miss the most.
You’ve probably guessed by now that I really don’t like using the mouse. I use i3 with dmenu/rofi as a launcher, Emacs with Vim bindings for my editor, and even Vimium when I’m browsing the web.
In fact, I’ve accidentally disabled the trackpad on some laptops and didn’t even realize it for an hour. I’ve tried very hard to replicate that experience on either Mac or Windows over the last 17 years and it’s nearly impossible.
What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?
I use a Dell XPS 13 from a couple of years back that I bought refurbished. It has an Intel Core i5-6200U ‘Skylake’ chip with two cores, I think (I don’t really do a whole lot of heavy lifting): 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. It’s not crazy powerful but my setup is so minimal and light, it boots up in like eight seconds and absolutely flies. I don’t do any gaming or heavy graphical editing or anything. I think it weighs less than the original iPad. And I carry a handful of dongles so I can connect it to the variety of monitors that are available to me in all the different offices where I find myself consulting. It’s perfect for me.
The one piece of hardware I love the most is my Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches. The fact that the keys are all blank is great. Learning Vim years ago is the primary reason I learned to touch type, but this keyboard has really forced me to improve. I’ve attached a screenshot of the workstation at my last gig. That’s Xscreensaver running on some crappy monitor they gave me.
Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?
At any given time, I have 3-6 workspaces running different apps:
Workspace 0. VMs (VirtualBox running whatever I need here)
Notice they each correspond to numbers on the keyboard. Three that my left hand can easily grab and three that my right hand can grab. This is all done with eight lines in my config file. Each one is a keyboard stroke away, no annoying click-click-click of Alt-tab.
Interview conducted May 13, 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.
