Mint with Mate. VM for multiple Windows/Office versions (service business).
Runtime between boots is at least a week (heavy use of Flash eats at resources).
Much of my time is in the browser, the rest is in VIM.
How many of you use a Linux distro as your primary desktop OS?
41–50 of 68 posts
Re: How many of you use a Linux distro as your primary desktop OS?
#42Currently on Ubuntu running Unity. Was a long time KDE user running various distros with KDE environment.
For someone who cannot afford a Mac and needs a -nix based system for day to day development activities, Ubuntu seems to provide the right set of features.
I might have tried to use a Mac had it been cheaper, but now moving away from Linux would be worth some thought for me.
Re: How many of you use a Linux distro as your primary desktop OS?
#43Linux can't be beat for free music production software!-THats good although using Jack (a bit more sophisto) can be a learning curve at first.
Okay, I used Ableton on Win7 for a while, and tried to keep making music when I made the switch to Linux, and so far (after 3 years of on-and-off effort) it's been a complete and total failure for me, and I don't know anyone making non-experimental electronic music on Linux. I'd like to know more about your setup.
It would help if you described the problem. I recorded and mixed a couple of (non-electronic music) albums with ardour under Linux and it was pretty straightforward. (As an aside, for electronic music, Renoise works very well under Linux.)
I don't think the FLOSS tools are uniformly great, but the situation isn't hopeless, and is certainly much better than it was when I started trying to record under Linux.
Re: How many of you use a Linux distro as your primary desktop OS?
#44Debian. 1) the customization options (tiling WMs ftw) 2) the ease of replicating the production environment I work with 3) the package managers 4) the everything-is-an-ascii-stream metaphor and the ease of creating and using tiny, tiny executables (e.g. shell scripts, daemons, composable cli utils, etc) 5) the complete and total freedom to install and use whatever I want, whenever I want without ever having to pay fo…
I've been dreaming of a fully rebuilt hacker-friendly OS for a while. Trouble is, it's hard to justify development, even for FOSS, unless you can find some kind of hook for the mainstream, for reasons that may not seem apparent at first.
Chief among these concerns: isn't it a little insular to create an OS that will only be used by people with the utility to write their own software? At some point, the software must be developed on the OS it runs on, and most software will be for mainstream users (outside of server-side code). This is theoretically solved by stuff like POSIX, but now we're talking about abandoning those standards in favor of more modern ideas.
There is definitely some discussion to be had on the topic of how to build and market a new desktop OS stack in open source. I have a lot of ideas around UI/UX for both hackers and mainstream users, but I'm very conscious of how little I know about system architecture, especially after reading articles by people who have built stuff like Plan9. If people are sufficiently interested, let me know and we can start a listserv or something to bounce around ideas.
Re: How many of you use a Linux distro as your primary desktop OS?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, I used Ableton on Win7 for a while, and tried to keep making music when I made the switch to Linux, and so far (after 3 years of on-and-off effort) it's been a complete and total failure for me, and I don't know anyone making non-experimental electronic music on Linux. I'd like to know more about your setup.
It would help if you described the problem. I recorded and mixed a couple of (non-electronic music) albums with ardour under Linux and it was pretty straightforward. (As an aside, for electronic music, Renoise works very well under Linux.) I don't think the FLOSS tools are uniformly great, but the situation isn't hopeless, and is certainly much better than it was when I started trying to record under Linux.
What distro did you start with? Mostly I had trouble with setting up JACK.
Then, I have to admit, I didn't make it easy for myself; I tried to use SuperCollider, which worked... Somewhat, until I nerded out and tried to speak to it from within Haskell.
I'm really tempted by Renoise, though.
Re: How many of you use a Linux distro as your primary desktop OS?
#46Debian. 1) the customization options (tiling WMs ftw) 2) the ease of replicating the production environment I work with 3) the package managers 4) the everything-is-an-ascii-stream metaphor and the ease of creating and using tiny, tiny executables (e.g. shell scripts, daemons, composable cli utils, etc) 5) the complete and total freedom to install and use whatever I want, whenever I want without ever having to pay fo…
I've been dreaming of a fully rebuilt hacker-friendly OS for a while. Trouble is, it's hard to justify development, even for FOSS, unless you can find some kind of hook for the mainstream, for reasons that may not seem apparent at first. Chief among these concerns: isn't it a little insular to create an OS that will only be used by people with the utility to write their own software? At some point, the software must…
Really at this point it's fair to say the the current Linux desktop stack is already a miracle; a backwards-incompatible rebuild is just impossible, or at least with the current state of the mainstream UI development tools.
Which, on the other hand, I think is rapidly evolving, now that OOP is out of its hype phase, and can now be evaluated a bit more (pun almost intended) objectively, and freed from its unnecessary parts, and that front-end JS and functional reactive techniques are bringing new ideas and especially terse and powerful notations and abstractions to describe UI layouts and interactions, to the table.
One can dream of an invention-of-the-C-language-like situation where a team of lone hackers harness the power of a bump in expressive power to formalize the current state of their UI metaphors and reimplement it from scratch and then build upon that at tremendous (relative) speeds...
Well, I dream.
Futzing with front-end JS frameworks is having unexpected effects on my worldview, right now.
Re: How many of you use a Linux distro as your primary desktop OS?
#47I don't currently have a "primary desktop", but yeah I run Linux on basically all of my computers. Mostly Ubuntu or Debian - Ubuntu on this computer.
There are a lot of reasons, but high among them are the ability to dive into the code when I'm curious about what's going on under the hood, a solid tiling window manager well integrated with my shell, and habits and familiarity built up over almost two decades now of using primarily Linux.
There's doubtless things other OSes could do to be more my speed; honestly the Windows 8 UI, while ugly, fit my work flow slightly better than previous incarnations. No one targeting "mainstream" seems to want me, though - even the Linux distros are barely usable in the default installs.
Re: How many of you use a Linux distro as your primary desktop OS?
#48Debian. 1) the customization options (tiling WMs ftw) 2) the ease of replicating the production environment I work with 3) the package managers 4) the everything-is-an-ascii-stream metaphor and the ease of creating and using tiny, tiny executables (e.g. shell scripts, daemons, composable cli utils, etc) 5) the complete and total freedom to install and use whatever I want, whenever I want without ever having to pay fo…
Composability, and ease of pulling things between shell and scripts and GUI, are a major win.
Re: How many of you use a Linux distro as your primary desktop OS?
#49Debian. 1) the customization options (tiling WMs ftw) 2) the ease of replicating the production environment I work with 3) the package managers 4) the everything-is-an-ascii-stream metaphor and the ease of creating and using tiny, tiny executables (e.g. shell scripts, daemons, composable cli utils, etc) 5) the complete and total freedom to install and use whatever I want, whenever I want without ever having to pay fo…
I've been dreaming of a fully rebuilt hacker-friendly OS for a while. Trouble is, it's hard to justify development, even for FOSS, unless you can find some kind of hook for the mainstream, for reasons that may not seem apparent at first. Chief among these concerns: isn't it a little insular to create an OS that will only be used by people with the utility to write their own software? At some point, the software must…
"At some point, the software must be developed on the OS it runs on"
I'm not sure that's really true, particularly with emulation.
Re: How many of you use a Linux distro as your primary desktop OS?
#50Xubuntu is my primary desktop, although I use a variety of distros.
There are so many advantages ove Windows that it is not even close. Mac OSX is almost usable, but the machines are too expensive. I sometimes have used a Mac, but my most recent is a G4 and I don't use it because it does not get security updates. With Windows, I'll say a few things. I don't like software that is designed to be unreliable, as Windows is. It is clumsy to use and makes me feel dirty even using it.
I try other OSes a good bit. PCBSD is pretty nice. I used Syllable a fair amount. Transparently provable security and a decent desktop would draw me to try a new OS.