Posts tagged: LINUX

Welp, I did it, I switched from Sublime Text to Visual Studio Code. Sublime Text was my primary editor for many years, but I’ve moved on!

My recent reinstall of Ubuntu 21.04 (to fix some driver problems) reminded me there is more to the world than XMonad. I played with Gnome Shell 3 for a day, and it’s all right. I don’t hate it (and I didn’t hate Unity either).

After a couple years of mostly using XMonad on my Linux machines instead of a standard Desktop Environmnt, I’m coming around to using XFCE. I’ve always liked it; it’s been my installed “fallback” DE (for when you need the damned settings dialog for some thing or other). Now it’s becoming my primary.

I like the low resource use. I don’t hate Unity and Gnome Shell but they are too much for my older machines.

When I first switched from OS X to Ubuntu for my daily development work, one of the things I missed a lot was Divvy.

“Window throwing” is the purpose of Divvy (and Spectacle, which I later replaced it with). With a single keyboard shortcut, I can make the foreground window fill the right half of the screen. Or the left half. Or the bottom right quadrant. Or the whole screen. Any rectangle I care to define. I can even send it to the other monitor.

Last summer I switched from OS X to Ubuntu for my day-to-day work. It’s gone well. Here’s a condensed rundown of some of the things I’ve noticed.

Things I miss when using OS X:

• ctrl key on both sides of the keyboard
• one-key app switching
• System-wide package management
• ctrl-alt-T default to bring up a new terminal

Things I miss when using Linux:

• Selecting menu items by typing their first letters
• Emacs-compatible key bindings in text fields
• LaunchBar
• Consistent mic support across applications
• Full-fledged Exchange integration (still haven’t bothered to get davmail running)

Cross-platform bright spots:

Once in a while I look at a sampling of recent dpaste activity. Partly I do it so I’m not totally out of touch with what my site contains. Partly I do it because it’s just interesting.

And I do it to confirm that the site is actually used by people who want to share code snippets, not just spambots who fire their cannons into every porthole.

I just sampled 10 random items from the last week. Happily, no spam. Here’s what I saw:

In July, I switched from OS X to Ubuntu as my workday environment. For three years my personal MacBook Air had been pulling double duty, personal computer plus workstation at my job (each role with its respective user on the box). When the combined demands for disk space exceeded the 250GB SSD, I took that as a sign that it was time for a change. I work outside my office enough that an external HD wasn’t a practical solution, and a USB key is too slow.

So, I requested a Windows laptop from the company stash. Step one: wipe Windows off it. Step two: install Ubuntu 14.04.

Here are some highlights and hopefully useful details about the switch and the new setup.