Off topic, but I really enjoyed his post about commuting to work by bike[1]. I was in Krakow, Poland, and getting around by bike was a joy.
Unfortunately, here in Ukraine drivers are very aggressive and the infrastructure for biking is just not in place.
Linux Desktop Setup
31–40 of 232 posts
Re: Linux Desktop Setup
#32awesome setup
Re: Linux Desktop Setup
#33I have been using a very similar setup for 12 years now. In the past few months I've been wondering what the Linux experience is like for newcomers and "normal" users. I am considering doing a clean install with a full fledged modern desktop environment such as KDE. I may not be able to manage such an environment, I fear that it's too constrained compared to controlling everything that runs on my computer. But I'd li…
I did. It feels good. The interactions are smoother, file managers are more useful. Had to tweak some shortcuts to emulate some moves I am used to in tiling managers. I went from awesome to KDE (kubuntu 18.04lts). I do webdev, cm and reports at the moment. I believe the terminal only approach suits most sysadmin, devops and the like ; not your run off the mill wordpress dev.
In my current setup, I do not even have a file manager installed. I just use the coreutils (cd, ls, mv, cp, rm, etc.).
I'm not doing webdev, I mostly program in different languages (Racket, OCaml, C, and Python mostly) and write a lot of LaTeX. Most of my time is spent in Emacs (it's also were I'm doing my emails) and Firefox.
In addition to graphical file managers, I'm also wondering what it's like to use a mail client such as Thunderbird, Kmail, or Evolution.
Re: Linux Desktop Setup
#34Nice setup.
A while back I moved to Arch with Xmonad, dmenu, tmux etc, but for about a year now, my workstation has been the same tools on top of Ubuntu Server. I have an Ansible playbook that I can apply to a fresh install and have almost my whole working environment ready to go - just a few things I haven't got around to including/automating.
The great thing about running this kind of setup is that you need a deeper understanding of Linux to do all the things that you would otherwise rely on a fully-fledged DE to do for you. For me, this has translated into greater fluency on servers, because my daily driver more closely resembles one.
Re: Linux Desktop Setup
#35Everyone here scoring serious brownie points with their advanced setups. And here I am, having used Linux for my personal setup for 15 years, using pre-installed Ubuntu on a practically default GNOME desktop. It's wonderful that I can do that and be satisfied with that, without significantly hampering the possibility of advanced setups like the ones here. Despite all the systemd's, PulseAudio's and whatnot's, the cus…
Absolutely second that. I also had my nerd times when I dedicated every free minute to Gentoo compiling, or to configure my screenrc, Xorg.conf, make menuconfig or whatever was in fashion. But in the end, it's an OS, a GUI, it's the basis for getting real work done. I used xfce, GNOME, KDE, it all gets the job done. But somehow I can no more get enthusiastic about spending hours for configuring a tiling WM like Xmonad. I just cannot seem the benefit behind the steep learning curve. And I use my touchpad and my trackpoint. Sorry for that...
Re: Linux Desktop Setup
#36It's been about 10 years since I used linux on the desktop. I notice this post on the front page and think: "Great! Let's have a look at what a modern linux desktop can look like.."
Oh.. It looks exactly like running a high resolution VGA-mode console with tmux and no X. :P
(Probably very effective though!)
Re: Linux Desktop Setup
#37Re: Linux Desktop Setup
#38I recently saw a thing about xmonad not under any circumstances being ported to wayland, due to its very high level of integration with X. Which to me read as, would require a rewrite rather than there can be no successor. Still, someone does have to actually put in the work.
Re: Linux Desktop Setup
#39That's not a desktop setup. It's much more complicated than the workstation setup I use at work. A desktop setup is my Xiaomi laptop with Ubuntu 18.04 that I use as media caster or to browse amazon while on the couch. It works flawlessly, much better than the preinstalled Windows 10 in chinese.
I don't see at all why you're saying it's not a desktop setup. It's obviously a workstation computer with media capabilities. The word desktop implies pretty much that. In contrast to desktop, there are portable computers and servers. Today the difference between portable and desktop amounts to just additional power management tools, so it's pretty much the same. So there's just workstation and server, ignoring Andro…
> It's obviously a workstation computer with media capabilities. The word desktop implies pretty much that.
What? No.
A desktop is a computer sitting on the top of your desk. And on the software-side there is the Desktop Metaphor, which describes an interface that behaves like the top of your desk, with free arrangement of all meaning of your work.
This article on the other side describes a workspace with multiple machines and mostly no free arrangement of work-elements. So it's not fullfilling the hardware-definition, and pretty weak on the software-definition.
This article is clearly about a workspace that blows beyond the classical workspace-definition of a desktop. Which is good IMHO, but means we need better namings for such things, and even if it's just for the sake to distinguish different tools and workflows. We are now moving to integrate Mobile Devices like iOS&Android into our workspaces, and on Windows-tablets we have touch-interfaces which start to be very different from normal mouse&keyboard-interfaces. And then there is also the classical terminal-interface, which this article is very heavy leaning toward.
Re: Linux Desktop Setup
#40I'm always kind of amazed at this kind of desktop setups, and I guess they're not suitable for lots of people for the simple reason that most users have a "consumer" relationship with computers and not a "producer" one.
My biggest question here for people with this kind of text setup would be: don't you surf the web? Do you use then lynx or another text web browser? What about services and platforms that are designed from scratch with images and video as a prominent part of that UI? (Twitter, Facebook, Amazon store for example)?
I guess you simply switch to a visual browser and some visual tool to play video (vlc, mplayer), but I'm curious and I wonder if that text/keyboard mode can be satisfying or convincing for users that are used on the traditional visual UI with windows, icons and the mouse paradigm.
I see the advantages here (OP mentions some of them), but I wonder if the trade offs for the normal user are to big to work in this kind of setup. Who would you recommend this to?