My Linux Rig

The Linux Setup - Chris Knadle, Engineer/System Administrator

I found Chris through a post on the Linux New York (LUNY) listserv. His description here of his tools and how he chooses them is great, as is his distro evaluation table. The interview is long, but there’s a lot of really interesting stuff stuff here, from the mechanical (how he uses KDE) to the conceptual (the social challenges of collaborative package maintenance).

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

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1. Who are you, and what do you do?

   Short version: engineer/system admin/power user/gamer/amateur radio operator.

   I’m mainly an RF and electrical engineer, and a Linux system administrator (primarily on Debian these days). I’m also a programmer (C, C++, Qt, Bash, Assembly, on rare occasion Perl or Python, or various Macro languages in documents) but on a day-to-day basis I consider myself more of a “power user.” I’ve also active on 2m FM ham radio, gaming (mostly 3D FPS and RTS games) and I occasionally do woodworking, auto repair, embedded system programming, hardware design, and fly RC model aircraft. [In case anyone is over-impressed by this list, I’ll just mention that “I’m just a regular guy” — I’m friendly and I don’t have a big ego.]

   I’ve recently started to delve into Debian package development (mostly out of necessity, the mother of invention) and just recently set up my own private signed repository via the reprepro package, along with a custom keyring package, although I’m currently re-working some of the details.

   A couple of months ago I ended up having to do an NMU on the Mumble VoIP package after the maintainer broke the package (due to lack of upstream support for the required base assumption codec, CELT 0.7.1), then acted quite unkindly, leading to a conflict and a two-month heated discussion with the Debian Technical Committee, then forcing someone to do an NMU since the maintainer refused to help or communicate at all after the decision. Debian has it’s share of social problems — and unfortunately they don’t have a code-of-conduct like Ubuntu has. This social brokenness is the exception rather than the rule, but it’s an ongoing unhandled problem which Debian is well known for. And although Ubuntu has a social contract, that doesn’t really solve the problem because Ubuntu wants packages to go through Debian first. Same goes for Mint.

   However as part of the Mumble NMU work, I got in contact with a very pleasant Austrian Debian developer (Gregor Herrmann) who I briefly met in person during DebConf10 in NYC, and I’ve been slowly gaining a bit of helpful mentoring from him as part of our continuing discussions. I haven’t yet uploaded a Debian package of my own through debian-mentors so I’m not officially a maintainer of a package yet, but I likely will sometime during 2013. Maybe I’ll eventually apply for Debian’s New Maintainer process… we’ll see. I have plenty of interests that will still keep me busy if I don’t. ;-)

2. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

   I run Debian Sid for my own desktops and laptops, along with a few packages from Debian Experimental as needed. For servers and other non-power users, I stick with Debian Stable.

   I started experimenting with Linux in late 1994 with Slackware, and finally started using it on the desktop in 1997 with the release of Window Maker, and it became my main desktop in 1998 after the release of KDE v1. I’ve mainly been using KDE ever since.

   Slackware was wonderful but too really troublesome to keep up-to-date (the procedure was “just reinstall” at the time — then download and recompile all the locally-compiled programs…). I did learn to configure and compile the Linux kernel during this time, which is something I still do today.

   I made the (somewhat painful) switch to Debian in August 1999, which was the Slink release. Back then Debian was painful to install because there was no kernel driver auto-detection — the installer would literally ask during the install for each kernel module that was needed. As I learned more about it I started to experiment with running Testing and Unstable, and I’ve been running Debian Unstable as my main desktop distribution since 2002 — I mainly started running it because it was what gets the most support from Debian developers. That it also happens to be the platform that all new Debian packages need to target is just a side bonus. ;-)

3. What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

   Debian-packaged external kernel modules: virtualbox-source, tp-smapi-source, nvidia-kernel-source (proprietary Nvidia driver :-( for 3D support as well as TwinView for projectors/presentations)

   Kernel: custom-compiled (currently 3.5.7) to a Debian package from “vanilla” upstream source using the “linux-stable” upstream git repo

   Browser: Iceweasel (from Debian Experimental)
   CAD: LibreCAD, FreeCAD, and a commercial OpenGL CAD package (VariCAD) in a VM
   Desktop Environment: KDE4
   File Browser: Krusader
   Editor: Nano
   Image Editor: GIMP
   IRC Client: Irssi, Konversation
   Mail client: KMail
   Movie Viewer: SMPlayer (for DVDs), SMPlayer2, VLC
   Music Player: Qmmp
   Office Suite: LibreOffice
   PDF viewer: Okular
   Terminal: Konsole
   Torrent Client: KTorrent
   Version Control: Git, git-svn for working with svn repos
   Virtualization: VirtualBox, occasionally KVM
   VoIP client: Mumble

   Favorite games on Linux: Amagetron Advanced, FlightGear (via the FGo! program), Freedroid, Freedroid RPG, KMahjongg, KSudoku, Oolite, Prboom, Pynagram, Ur-Quon Masters

4. What kind of hardware do you run it on?

   Laptop: Lenovo T61P-CTO ThinkPad

   Desktop: Pentium 4 custom built in 2001; Several other Pentium 4 and Pentium III desktops as well.

   My firewalls arerunning Debian too; they’re Alix boxes using the AMD Geode LX800 CPU.

   The oldest hardware that runs Debian are some Pentium II’s made by IBM (300XL). These were what I was using to duplicate servers in preparation for testing major Debian upgrades on servers before I started doing that work in VMs.

5. What is your ideal Linux setup?

   The GUI choice of Xfce4, LXDE, and/or KDE4.

   Hardware that allows 3D capability (preferably using open source drivers, if possible).

   The distribution needs to allow updating to the latest version in perpetuity, rather than needing to reinstall, and run on both new(er), old, and /very/ old hardware. So far Debian seems best suited to these goals. If I had to choose an alternative it would probably be OpenSuSE, Vector, or Fedora.

   For laptops I want sleep and hibernation-to-disk, as well as the security of using full-disk LUKS encryption, preferably with LVM on top so that only one LUKS password is required, and XFS or ext4 for filesystem choice. XFS is fast but is prone to corruption on unclean shutdown and is troublesome to fsck/repair (it requires a LiveCD distro with cryptfs and xfs_repair on it). Ext4 is reliable but somewhat slower. I haven’t yet tried Btrfs.

   For KDE4 I immediately turn off the “Desktop Search” features of Nepomuk and Strigi Indexing, because these are incredible performance hogs that quickly make a KDE4 desktop sluggish. I leave the desktop settings as “desktop” with no folder plasmoid nor desktop icons, add plasmoids to the desktop for status of CPU, temperatures, and network throughput, and customize the taskbar as well. Lately I’ve added a “quicklaunch” bar on the left-side of the screen with programs I typically use so that I don’t have to go into the “K” menu as often. I also always switch the K menu to “Classic Menu Style” over the “Application Launcher Style.” I use some of the 3D compositing effects like “Cover Switch” for Alt-Tab switching and the “Present Windows” action when the mouse is put into the top-left corner of the screen, but I minimize using these features — so no wobbly-windows or exploding windows on closing, etc. I try to keep it simple and stick to the features that are useful yet non-distracting.

   A weird note about my use of KDE4: I don’t use multiple monitors, nor “activities,” and I generally don’t use multiple desktops either. Over the years I’ve simply gotten into the habit of letting the various program windows pile on top of each other and using Alt-Tab or the label in the taskbar to get to the program/window I want to get to at the moment. I don’t really know why I still do this and why this still works for me, because everybody else I talk to wants multiple monitors.

   On a related note concerning distributions — in March 2011 Mid Hudson Valley Linux and Open Source Users Group had a “Desktop Shootout” meeting discussing window manager and desktop environment choices which raised my interest in looking at them again. I then started to think about trying several other distributions to have a look at what they’re like now. In August 2011 I tried the top 25 free software distributions in the order that was listed by DistroWatch.com at that time, loading each of them in a VirtualBox VM. Here are some loose notes based on the experience.

   

   * = distribution is Debian-based.

   1. Unity GUI is confusing… I don’t like it. 3D = runs poorly in a VM. The AppArmor security features are relatively nice, but Ubuntu targets newer hardware, and last I ran it, they didn’t support upgrades-in-place even though Debian (which is what they’re based on) does.
   2. Fedora 17 was pleasant and worth a look. SELinux by default is good, but it’s too complicated a solution, IMHO.
   3. OpenSUSE was surprisingly pleasant and snappy — definitely worth a look. Definitely one of my personal “top 5 distros.”
   4. Arch Linux has SUPERfast package installs. However there’s no graphical installer, I couldn’t get the sound working, and some of the instructions were wrong concerning installing Grub2; the “Beginners Guide” is correct.
   5. Puppy is very light and quick, but I didn’t find a way of installing the packages I needed.
   6. PCLinuxOS gave me packaging trouble, and when I looked at the /etc/apt/sources.list file I was horrified to find only “rpm” lines. :-O A Debian packaging tool using RPMs? Sacrilege.
   7. Ultimate ran terribly; it’s “max 3D” which in a VM means “max slow.”
   8. Pear was wonderful to see, because the entire GUI emulates an Apple Macintosh, except the Apple is a Pear. Seriously, it’s cool.
   9. FreeBSD doesn’t install a GUI by default, and doesn’t seem to tell you how to do so, either. It’s not that you can’t, it’s just that I didn’t figure it out even after web searching. Not cool.
   10. Gentoo. This is where I want to start cursing. The base install and KDE 4.8 was a *three full day compile* on a Core2 duo using both cores and carefully following the instructions, plus having to figure out emerge command line options to deal with unexpected dependency issues. After all that, I couldn’t get X to start so the whole experiment was a big waste of very hot CPU time. Ultimately frustrating. Gentoo advocates are quick to point out that the distro is the fastest of them all — which let’s just say it is — yet it gets there by way of massive CPU time, such that the result is false economy.
       The Gentoo project has a lot of great documentation on the web, and I greatly respect their developers and their choice of OpenRC as an initialization system, but running the Gentoo distribution is not for me.
   11. Vector is Slackware-based, but with package management. This distro was fun and snappy — enough that I gave serious consideration to keeping it loaded and continuing to play with it.
   12. Knoppix is my personal favorite Debian-based LiveCD distro, so I kept it in the list even though it wasn’t in the top 25 on DistroWatch.

   Other notes:

   • Many of the Debian-based distributions allow running as a LiveCD and updating/installing packages into memory while still running the LiveCD (i.e. this doesn’t alter the contents of the hard disk at all).
   • Distributions that require 3D for the GUI (Ubuntu, Ultimate) are a pain because that causes the GUI to be very slow in a VM.
   • Some of the installer/updaters in the distribution were difficult to use or made it difficult to search for a particular package (Fuduntu, SolusOS).

6. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

   The 3D CAD drawing is a corner desk I custom designed and built some years ago which is very strong, yet can be disassembled, moved, and reassembled without any damage to the wood whatsoever. It’s built from three sheets of oak 3/4” ply, two pine 2x4’s, and some decorative 3/4” quarter-round, using 1/2” deep screw-in wood insert nuts for locations to bolt to (McMaster Carr calls these “Tapping Hex Drive Insert Nuts with Flange”). I tried to find something reasonably priced before doing this but didn’t find what I needed. Total cost to build was in the range of around $300. I’m using the desk to this day, and I’m still very glad I built it.

Interview conducted 1/9/13

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.

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The Linux Setup - Terry Hancock, Journalist/Producer

I came across Terry through a Linux.com feature that mentioned him as a Linux hero. I was also familiar with his work for Free Software Magazine, so he seemed like a great subject.

Terry is another power KDE user who makes great use of the virtual desktops. You’ll also probably be very impressed by the amount of video production Terry does using Debian Testing (although Terry points out that it sometimes requires a bit of work on his part).

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

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1. Who are you, and what do you do?

   I’m Terry Hancock. I’ve done a lot of different things over the years, but for the last several years I’ve been writing a column for Free Software Magazine about free software and free culture topics.

   Since 2009, I’ve been actively working on producing and directing a free-culture science-fiction web video series which will be called “Lunatics.” We’re currently involved in recording voices for the pilot episode, and I hope to be working on animation again before the year is out.

2. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

   On my desktop workstation, I run Debian’s main distribution — currently the “testing” version, “Wheezy.” I’ve tried some specialized derivative distributions, but none of them really worked out for me. I wind up customizing things and I want to control which apps are installed, try out new ones, and so on. So it’s easier to just use the main upstream distribution.

   This is not without headaches though. I probably have more problems with hardware compatibility because of this choice — especially with multimedia software. I have to work out my own dependency problems to a greater degree (though it’s not nearly as bad as installing from source).

   My wife is currently using Ubuntu Studio on her system, and we have a couple of other Debian systems for our kids.

   We also maintain a virtual private server for web hosting. That system runs Debian as well — though we stick with the “stable” distribution.

3. What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

   Well, first of all, I’m a KDE4 user, and I’m pretty happy with that, although the sound system is not as easy to manage as I would like.

   For my work, I use a lot of different applications, but some of the most important are: Inkscape, Gimp, Blender, Kate (the editor — which I’m using more and more instead of Gvim, which I used to use all the time), Libre Office, Konqueror (for file management), VLC, and Audacity (which I’m doing a lot with this week).

   I use both Iceweasel and Chromium browsers. I primarily use Iceweasel for general-purpose browsing, while I use Chromium specifically with social-media websites (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Identica, and Diaspora). I primarily interact with Identica and Twitter using the Choqok client, though.

   Debian’s multimedia packages are not as up-to-date as some, and I wind up using a few pacakges from other sources. I’m currently running a build of Blender with Freestyle integration from http://graphicall.org.

   When I program, I use Python pretty much exclusively. A long time ago I wrote software in C, C++, and even Fortran, but these days I stick to high-level stuff, and Python serves well for that.

4. What kind of hardware do you run it on?

   This is a self-built desktop with 64-bit quad-core AMD system with 8GB of RAM. The motherboard and drives are from ASUS. I’m using the on-board graphics and sound systems.

   I have an LG Blu-Ray/M-Disc/DVD-RW/CD-RW drive as well, which lets me write just about any optical media I need to. The printer (and scanner) is a low-end HP multifunction machine, and the monitor is a widescreen 21” with 1920x1080 pixels (so it can display full HD video at full-scale — which is important since I’ve got two major projects in that format, both “Lunatics” and “Lib-Ray”).

   A lot of the components have been through a few other computers before winding up in this one — there’s always a few parts lying around our place.

   We have a LAN and my wife and kids have their own systems. The computers are a bit behind the technology curve, but we’re able to keep them working. Obviously this is something we put a lot of value on.

5. What is your ideal Linux setup?

   I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got. There will always be pressure to increase performance for things like rendering scenes in Blender or editing video with Kdenlive, but it’s not really proving to be a problem yet.

   When it does, we’re probably talking about creating a render farm server of some kind (not a new desktop).

6. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

   Which one? :-)

   I actually use the “virtual desktops” feature extensively. I have 20 desktops organized by task, and I spread out the applications I’m using accordingly. So, for example, I have four named desktops for “Lunatics” project work, one for “Lib-Ray,” two for Morevna Project, one for Free Software Magazine, and so on. This way I can leave windows open and just switch desktops when going from one task to another.

   I’ve attached a capture of my “Lunatics 1” desktop with Blender and Audacity both open on project files in progress — these are the “heavy-hitting” applications I’ve been using on production for “Lunatics.”

   One thing you might notice here is that I use the pin-up notes to keep track of to-do lists and the like on each project. Maintaining this place-like metaphor on my desktops helps me deal with the mental clutter from several projects that I’m working on simultaneously.

Interview conducted 9/23/12

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 us on Google+ here and subscribe to our feed here.

The Linux Setup - Jayson Rowe, Server Administrator

I know Jayson from Google+, which despite its reputation as a ghost town, actually has quite a lot of Linux-centric people and conversations. Jayson is a true explorer, though. Reading through his interview, you can see he’s a KDE person who leans on Xfce when he doesn’t have the specs for KDE. The subtext is ‘anything but GNOME,’ which is a fairly common approach (there are also plenty of ‘anything but KDE’ users, too). But after Jayson submitted his interview, he wrote in to let me know he was giving GNOME a shot, which is pretty cool. It’s very easy to get caught up in your Linux favorites, but part of what makes it so much fun is trying out something different, if only for a few hours.

Jayson reports GNOME is growing on him. But he might just be humoring me.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

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1. Who are you, and what do you do?

   My name is Jayson Rowe and I am a Server Administrator that also does some programming. I am also a Fedora Ambassador, a member of the Fedora Infrastructure team and a Fedora packager as well.

2. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

   I use Fedora Linux on all of my machines (except one which runs Slackware). I ran Kubuntu/Ubuntu for several years before switching back to Fedora. Fedora simply meets my needs better now.

3. What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

   I use the KDE Desktop on my main machines (Xfce on some other low-powered machines). I am a big fan of Sublime Text 2. I use it for practically everything from quick edits, to writing code to filling out this interview. Although SL2 is my main editor, I do use Kate and Vim (if in a terminal) some as well. I also rely a lot on Chrome, Dropbox and Wine as well as VirtualBox to get things done. I do a *lot* in virtual machines.

4. What kind of hardware do you run it on?

   My setup at home is a system I built with an AMD Phenom II X4 965, 16GB of RAM, 23” and 22” LCD Monitors and a bunch of spinning platter drives. I tried an SSD but it died on me, and I haven’t gotten around to replacing it. I also have a little MiniITX Atom PC that is connected via Synergy that in a lot of ways serves as a third monitor (usually with Twitter up).

   I also have a Nexus 7, an old HTC Incredible (running CM7, of course), a Dell Mini 9 netbook, a Dell Studio 15 laptop (running the Fedora Java Remix with GNOME Shell, as inspired by Jos) and an aging-but-still-useful Thinkpad Z60m (which is my lone Slackware machine).

5. What is your ideal Linux setup?

   Intel i7 6-core
   Decent sized SSD for ‘/’ and ‘/home’
   Two big platter disks in a RAID-1 for ‘/tmp’, ‘/var’, ‘/data’ and swap.
   16+ GB of RAM (would love 32GB).
   

   For a software setup, I’m very happy with Fedora, KDE and Xfce for my needs.

6. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

   I don’t always see my desktop, but when I do, it’ll be a cool picture. I have quite a collection of images I get from InterfaceLift and I keep them in my Dropbox folder. In KDE I have it set to change the picture on each monitor every 15 minutes. My Xfce machines still have the Fedora Beefy Miracle fireworks.

   Here is my main PC at home running KDE:

   

   Here is my little Xfce PC at home that acts as my third monitor:

   

Interview conducted August 29, 2012

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 us on Google+ here and subscribe to our feed here.

The Linux Setup - Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE

I targeted Jos Poortvliet for an interview because I’ve been hitting up a bunch of openSUSE people. The 12.1 release is so fantastic, I’ve become very curious about the people who work on openSUSE. Jos’ interview doesn’t disappoint, with tricked-out hardware and a KDE-centric workflow that includes vertical and horizontal monitors. People who love KDE really love it, but it seems like a tough desktop to learn. I’ve tried to work with it a few times, but the barrier to entry was too high for me. Jos explains it well, describing KDE as about workflow and GNOME Shell as about ease-of-use. It’s an interesting distinction.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

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1. Who are you, and what do you do?

   I’m Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE Community Manager for SUSE Linux. My job description boils down to “help openSUSE be successful.” As my skills are mostly in marketing and people stuff, I focus on those: helping the openSUSE developers get the word out on what they do and helping in social and organizational matters. I travel a fair bit — to conferences, talking about openSUSE. And I (help) organize events, get ‘cool stuff’ to openSUSE ambassadors who represent us at events and discuss such vague things as ‘strategy’ and ‘guiding principles’ within our community.

2. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

   On my desktop I have, of course, openSUSE with KDE’s Plasma Desktop. My laptop also runs openSUSE with GNOME Shell. And my wife insists on running Arch Linux, also with KDE Plasma Desktop ;-) .

3. What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

   With my work, which is mostly writing and talking, communication software is invaluable. I can work with only one mail client: Kontact. Despite its recent stability issues due to the re-architecture, it is still miles ahead of any competition in terms of workflow efficiency. That is also why I run KDE’s Plasma Desktop: I have a lot of work to do and want my desktop set up to be as efficient as possible, fitting my workflow. On my laptop, I often value ease-of-use more than efficiency or smooth workflow and thus I use GNOME Shell there.

   I also use Konversation for IRC, Kate for handling lots of documents I’m working on/with and Dropbox (soon to be replaced by ownCloud) to share these documents between my laptop and my desktop. Inkscape, Gwenview and GIMP for working with images, Dolphin for working with remote and local files as well as git and SVN repositories and I mix Chromium, Konqueror and Firefox for browsing. Chromium is the fastest and most convenient but very memory hungry; Firefox handles thus more ‘background’ tabs. And Konqi is the fastest for quickly viewing things and has some unique features you sometimes crave, like the powerful screen splitting.

4. What kind of hardware do you run it on?

   My desktop has a decent Core i5 (quadcore) with 8GB RAM and a few drives totaling up 2TB including a 60GB SSD to boot up fast. My laptop is an old Sony Vaio TZ — ultraportable before the Ultrabook fad (also ultra-expensive back then). It has taken the IT world an annoying five years to almost catch up to that kind of portable power: only now can you buy Ultrabooks with a similar combination of portability, performance and battery life. Hence, I have ordered a Samsung Series 9 13” laptop (awesome stuff, really) to replace my Sony as it’s literally falling apart.

5. What is your ideal Linux setup?

   The one on my desktop: two full-HD screens, one horizontal, the other vertical. The vertical for notes, mail & IRC (on all desktops in the same position) and the horizontal for ‘the work,’ which I almost always do full-screen. The flexibility of Plasma means that I can actually have this setup exactly how I want it — I wouldn’t take any desktop project seriously that can’t do something like that…

6. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

Interview conducted July 30, 2012

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 us on Google+ here and subscribe to our feed here.

It’s Time for Canonical to Stop Protecting Unity

I recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my T43, just to take it for a test spin, and because I had heard a lot of really nice things about the release. I’m still totally in love with OpenSUSE 12.1, which is my day-to-day home OS, but the vast Ubuntu repositories are always a selling point for me. I was curious if Unity was workable for me down the line.

The T43 is a great machine but its lack of a super/Windows key is always a bit of a challenge since more and more desktop environments map cool functionality to that key. With Unity, I had a tough time mapping a new shortcut to the Dash. However, I was eventually able to remap a shortcut to the launcher, because I try and avoid using the mouse as much as possible.

I’m still shocked by how complicated Unity is. Like how is the Unity plugin not its own application? And how is it not installed by default? Is this poor usability or is Canonical trying to dissuade users from making changes? I think it’s the latter given the warning from the CompizConfig Settings Manager, but all that warning does is make me wonder why making changes is so potentially dangerous.

Once I got the Unity shortcuts working, I felt like I was using GNOME 3, so I decided to install it, just to see how different it is in Ubuntu. GNOME 3 was also shockingly challenging to make function without a super key. But what I had working in my favor was understanding the GNOME 3 concept, and knowing what the different parts were called. I was eventually able to remap the super key, which calls up the search/application launching area, using dconf and changing the keybindings in org > gnome > desktop > wm > keybindings.

In general, the experience made me realize what a huge fan of GNOME 3 I’ve become. It works effortlessly for me. I use it fairly stock and don’t feel the need to make many changes, although I did install the shutdown button extension. Once I had the super button remapped, it felt just like home. I don’t think of it as a desktop environment so much as I think of it as the launcher I’ve always wanted.

Unity is fine to work with, but it still feels very similar to GNOME 3. I’m not sure why Canonical has spent so much time and effort making an environment that feels subtlely different from an existing one, but I appreciate that they seem to have resolved a lot of the technical issues I saw in 11.10. The lenses are an interesting concept, but I prefer to browse content through a web browser, rather than an application launcher.

Unity has the new HUD feature, allowing users to access application menus via typing. It’s an interesting concept, but because there’s no formal application nomenclature, users need to remember things like which programs Close to shut down versus which ones Quit. As much as I try to avoid the mouse, it’s usually pretty quick to just user the X button to close out of applications.

I was thinking a lot about the point of Unity when I had some interesting usability experiences over the past few weeks.

The first was using my friend’s MacBook to test some apps for work. I didn’t get the Finder area and had trouble identifying some programs along the dock. I made a comment along the lines of “This isn’t very intuitive, is it?” and my friend immediately disagreed and said he finds it effortless to work with.

Just a few days later, Linus Torvalds let loose with his now infamous rant against GNOME 3, which made me immediately realize that GNOME 3 is not working for everyone.

It seems painfully obvious to write this, but it bears repeating: not everyone uses computers in the same way. Any time anyone proposes there’s a magical, singular desktop experience that should work for everyone, we should all brace ourselves for failure.

And that’s really where I take exception to Unity. It’s not that it’s inherently bad — it’s that Canonical pushes it so hard on its users. They make it tough to customize Unity. They eliminate desktop competition. If a desktop environment isn’t customizable, there should be a variety of desktop environment options for users. In other words, if users can’t easily tweak an environment, it should be easy for them to choose a different one.

I can see how someone trying to tweak GNOME 3 might be frustrated by it. And for people who like using menus, it must be especially frustrating. But as someone who hates to touch the mouse, the GNOME 3 experience is fantastic. I feel no need to customize it because I only interact with it for the brief moment it takes to type the name of the program I need. Then, it disappears.

Windows 7 is actually shockingly receptive to this kind of workflow, with an amazing file search algorithm that seems to rate frequently used files above others. In that workflow, I hit the super key, type a file name, and Windows 7 shows me what matches. Right now a lot of my files begin with something like spring12, but Windows puts the ones I work with the most at the top of the list, making it easy to select and open, all from the Start menu. It’s a real time-saver, and is one of the few things I do in Windows that I wish I could do in GNOME 3 (GNOME 3 remembers recently-used files, but the search is not as comprehensive as Windows.’ Unity has a very nice search, though). Alas, it seems like this Windows 7 infatuation has an expiration date.

It’s important for distros to not only support different desktop environments, but also to curate them. Although OpenSUSE is known as a KDE-centric distribution, its GNOME implementation is fantastic. People seem to love Voyager, which is actually based on Xubuntu. Sabayon supports a number of desktop environments, too. That’s the way Linux distributions used to behave, before the emphasis on getting everything to fit on a single CD. It’s a tradition distributions should return to, making it very easy for users to choose and experiment with different environments.

GNOME 3 runs just fine on Ubuntu 12.04, but it’s a stock implementation. It’s great that Canonical believes in Unity, but it would also be nice if they threw some resources behind other desktop environments, too. Improving other desktops can only help improve Unity. Choice continues to be a core value in the Linux world. Canonical doesn’t inhibit choice with Ubuntu, but they could probably do more to promote it. As leaders within the Linux community (whether Canonical or the community likes it or not), promoting choice, even at the perceived expense of Unity, is very important.

It’s fine that Canonical has a vision for Unity that doesn’t allow easy user customization. But in the absence of customization, they should at least curate other environments so users have choice. The community-driven variants are great, but they’re not the same as a Canonical-supported environment.

If Canonical really believes in Unity, they shouldn’t be scared to put it up against KDE and GNOME and let their users pick which they prefer. Competition will only make Unity stronger, and in the end, that’s what everyone wants.