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.
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.
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.
Recently I switched my work environment from OS X to Ubuntu (a post on that project is in the works).
For years I’ve been using the standard Apple Keychain app, which has several points in its favor: it’s included with the OS, it integrates well with a lot of applications, and is not trying to “freemium” me into a paid tier. However, it’s OS X only, which meant I had to find something new.
Palm has announced the Foleo laptop-ish-device, which they are pitching as a smartphone enhancer. Interesting turnabout from the days of the original Pilot, which was pitched as a “Connected Organizer” that was dependent on your computer. The Foleo is a computer designed to be dependent on your phone.
I’m adding a reminder alarm (into my Palm TX, naturally) for 3 years from today, to go buy one of these on eBay for $75 and put Linux on it!
