Ramin Honary @ Ramin_HAL9001 @lemmy.ml

Software engineer, functional programming enthusiast.

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4 yr. ago

I use Xfce and Cinnamon, but I always install Gnome Terminal regardless (you don't need all of Gnome desktop to use it). The main reason I like Gnome Terminal is that it is very simple, and it lets you save your own terminal themes and switch between them from a context menu. Xfce terminal is nice and simple, but doesn't have this really handy theme switching feature.

That said, the terminal emulator I used most often is the Emacs built-in terminal emulator (term-mode), because it integrates flawlessly with other Emacs tools. But its rendering and theming isn't as nice as Gnome terminal, so I only recommend it if you are an Emacs user.

The first thing you need to ask is, are you using Xorg or Wayland? I will assume you are on X11 because I think most major distros still use it by default, but this is going to be changing soon. If you are using Wayland, ricing it uses a totally different set of tools.

The package manager of most major Linux distros let you install an alternative desktop environment. For example, if you are using Ubuntu with the default Gnome desktop, you could install Xfce using the command apt install xubuntu-desktop. Then logout, and in the screen where you type your password, select the Xfce desktop environment from the menu, and login again. Now you have your new desktop environment running the xfwm4 window manager.

You don't need Xfce desktop, but it is usually easier for beginners to customize than rolling your own desktop environment. Once you figure out Xfce ricing, you can try rolling your own.

An alternative to Xfce which is also very customizable is KDE Plasma, but they configure everything through their own internal tooling.

If you are using Xorg under Xfce, then from there you can install alternative window managers like i3, Awesome-WM, OpenBox, and so on. Most of the time you install this from the package manager. Most X11 window managers let you switch the current window manager from the command line. For example, to switch to OpenBox, in a terminal type openbox --replace. Any existing windows you have open will stay open but their decorations will change, and so will the wallpaper (probably).

Then you can install alternative window manager themes and icon packs from GitHub, or websites like https://www.xfce-look.org/browse/. Be aware that OpenBox may not be able to use all the themes that Xfwm4 can use. As always, read the manual.

Finally, you can install other desktop tools like Conky, Rofi, Kitty terminal, btop, Tint2 Panel.

For an Angry Birds clone, check out Apple Flinger

For a SimCity-like game, check out OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe)

Well, Ubuntu or any company could certainly do something like that. But then this company would simply be competing with Android with an incompatible app platform built on top of Linux. App developers who have a hard enough time developing their apps for both Android and iOS would not want to write their app for yet another incompatible proprietary platform, even if the underlying OS kernel was Linux.

As others have said, the real advantage to Linux, the real reason to use it, with desktop environments like Gnome or KDE, in spite of their minor flaws, is that the software is owned by all of us. Unlike proprietary software which you are basically renting for a monthly fee, on Linux you actually own your software and your data.

Not sarcastic, I genuinely like this sort of thing. To each their own.

I would go with Guile, because it is built-in to the Guix Package Manager which is a really good general-purpose package manager.

It ticks several of your boxes:

• has a CLI interpreter
• is a general purpose language, Scheme, amd compliant with revisions 5, 6, and 7 of the language standard
• allows writing in a functional style (it is one of the original functional programming languages)
• small disk footprint, but still large enough to be "batteries included"
• decent documentation, especially if you use Emacs
• simple setup: not so much, unless you are using Guix to begin with. The standard distribution ships with lots of pre-built bytecode files, you need an installer script to install everything.

It also has pretty good libraries for system maintenance and reporting:

• File-Tree-Walk
• A simple web server
• XML parsing

I'm a communist but I suddenly realised that American conservatives should all be hardcore Linux enthusiasts. Why is this not already the stereotype?

Libertarians and conservatives in the US demand liberty only for the already wealthy and powerful upper class, the liberty to enslave and exploit whomever and whatever they choose. They believe the ultra-wealthy have somehow earned the right to do so. On the contrary, the socialists, especially the anarchists, are opposed to unjust hierarchies, and the hierarchy created by wealthy and politically powerful classes are the most unjust of all -- quite the opposite of the libertarians and conservatives.

Libertarian (Liberal) propaganda appropriates the more popular socialist ideologies while conflating liberty for only the wealthy/powerful versus liberty for all people. One can see appropriation done in the same way in the very name of the National Socialist (Nazi) party of Germany. These tactics that were used by the Nazis are still used by various American conservative and libertarian parties, who mostly align under the umbrella of the Republican Party. Just look at what the Trump cult weirdos are all saying nowadays. It is pure KKK and Nazi ideology resurrected, under a thin veil of euphemisms.

So if you take at face-value what libertarian and conservative politicians in the US say publicly about freedom, small government, civil liberties, etc., then they ought to be very enthusiastically in favor of Linux, but it is all just propaganda. They don't care about freedom, only freedom for the elite clique of their supposed "supermen," the wealthy elites, the freedom to exploit groups of people who they hate most --- take your pick: foreigners, black people, women, gay and trans, Jews, Muslims, the "woke," the "leftist," etc. The libertarians and conservatives hate things that benefit society at large, because what benefits society also benefits these people they hate.

Linux is pretty authentically a community project for the good of society, and it is truly subversive to the authority of the corporations and elites. So the various libertarians and conservatives of the US recognize Linux as a threat. Only that small group of privileged, middle-class libertarians stupid enough to be duped by the wealthy elite propaganda believe that free software is aligned with their ideology.

both can be installed side by side if you have enough disk space.

Yeah, this is exactly what I do using QEMU and Aarch64 Debian. I suppose I could try the Asahi Linux in QEMU but that actually might be more difficult since I don't think QEMU can emulate the MacBook hardware, as far as I know. And I can't do dual boot, I want to be able to switch back and forth between Mac OS and Linux without rebooting anything.

You can try asahi linux on the macbook :)

I could, but I still need Mac OS for work-related things.

I switched to Linux permanently in 2008. Last OS I used before Linux was Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" (if I recall correctly) which is what came with the Macintosh PowerBook that I had bought roughly in the year 2004. I have never used Microsoft software unless someone was paying me to, but at the time, Windows XP was still all the rage even though Microsoft was trying to get everyone to switch to Windows Vista. (Vista got a lot of well-deserved hate too, sort of similar what we see with Windows 11 right now, actually.)

Anyway, I was a die-hard Apple fanboy, but getting more and more into free software and I kept on using Macports/Homebrew to build Linux stuff I found online, but back in those days a lot of apps I wanted to try did not have good support for the Darwin kernel build of GCC which was pretty old compared to what Linux was using at the time. Occasionally a build would fail, and I would try to port the software on my own, with the idea of maybe submitting a package to Macports. But after a while I realized, "if I want to use Linux software, why not just use Linux?"

So I bought a Netbook (Dell Inspiron Mini 10) with Ubuntu pre-installed. I really loved that little computer, I used it for a good 5 years until I needed a more powerful computer. I still have it, actually. I never went back to Apple until this year when I took a new job where they wanted me to use a MacBook Pro. (Again, not using proprietary software unless I am well paid.)

I can say with confidence that Linux is considerably better than Apple's operating systems. I use Aarch64 Debian 12.5 in a QEMU on that MacBook for most things, only switching over to Mac OS when I really need to.

How can you pirate Photoshop and Elements? They are WebAssembly binaries that phone home before you are allowed to use them.

Never tried it, but everyone I know who has tried it says its the most stable rolling release OS ever. That is pretty cool. Btrfs support is cool too, copy-on-write, deduplication, and whole-disk snapshot and rollback capability, its great for keeping your data safe.

I don't care about rolling releases, I get my stability from Debian, or sometimes Mint. If I want the latest software I'll install Guix packages or FlatPaks. And I can still use Btrfs on Debian.

I can explain the difference between X11 and Xorg with an analogy to the web and web browsers: X11 is like HTTP, Xorg is like the Chrome browser. X11 is the protocol, Xorg is software that implements that protocol.

X11 is old, it was designed back in the 1980s and includes messages for drawing lines and circles and fonts on the screen. Also, back then there were a lot of "thin clients", computers that were basically nothing but a browser, since graphics were computationally expensive and could not be done on the client computer, graphics rendering was done server side. There are lots of messages in the protocol for handling screen updates over a computer network.

Nowadays, all personal computers are powerful enough to render their own graphics, and no one needs the display server to draw individual lines or circles on screen. Vector graphics and fonts are done at the application level, not over the network. So these these messages specified in the X11 protocol are hardly ever used. Really, most of X11 (let's say 90% of it) is not used at all, only the parts where the keyboard and mouse are defined, and how you can allocate memory to buffer a graphic and copy that buffer to the display. But you still need to maintain the Xorg software to handle everything that X11 specifies, and this is just a waste of code, and a waste of time for the code maintainers.

So basically, they decided about 10-15 years ago that since no one uses most of X11, let's just define a new protocol (called Wayland) that only has the parts of X11 that everyone still uses, and get rid of the 90% of it that no one ever uses. Also, the protocol design takes into account the fact that most modern computers do all of their own rendering rather than calling out to a server to render for them. Also the Wayland protocol design takes into account that a lot of computers have graphics cards for accelerated graphics rendering.

Since the Wayland protocol is much simpler, it is easier for anyone to write their own software which implements the protocol, these software are called "compositors." Finally, 10 years after some of the first implementations of Wayland, the protocol and compositors are becoming mature enough that they can be used in ordinary consumer PCs.

No, it is because people in the Linux community are usually a bit more tech-savvy than average and are aware that OpenAI/Microsoft is very likely breaking the law in how they collect data for training their AI.

We have seen that companies like OpenAI completely disregard the rights of the people who created this data that they use in their for-profit LLMs (like what they did to Scarlett Johansson), their rights to control whether the code/documentation/artwork is used in for-profit ventures, especially when stealing Creative Commons "Share Alike" licensed documentation, or GPL licensed code which can only be used if the code that reuses it is made public, which OpenAI and Microsoft does not do.

So OpenAI has deliberately conflated LLM technology with general intelligence (AGI) in order to hype their products, and so now their possibly illegal actions are also being associated with all AI. The anger toward AI is not directed at the technology itself, it is directed at companies like OpenAI who have tried to make their shitty brand synonymous with the technology.

And I haven't even yet mentioned:

• how people are getting fired by companies who are replacing them with AI
• or how it has been used to target civilians in war zones
• or how deep fakes are being used to scam vulnerable people.

The technology could be used for good, especially in the Linux community, but lately there has been a surge of unethical (and sometimes outright criminal) uses of AI by some of the worlds wealthiest companies.

Thanks! I just tried it out, it looks nice! I'll stick with it for a bit.

Emacs is a religion, or an OS

Philosophy is a subset of religion, and there is a definitely an Emacs philosophy about making absolutely all software hackable, and controlling the computer using text.

App platforms are a subset of operating systems. People confuse the two because most app platforms are inseparable from the operating system on which they run. But some software, like the Web, or Java, or to some extent .NET/Mono, are app platforms that run the same apps across multiple operating systems. Emacs is an app platform.

How do you think one should get started with Emacs? Should they start start with regular GNU Emacs or should they install one of the “distros”?

I always recommend using the default setup for any software. The same goes for learning GIMP, Krita, Blender, FreeCAD, or whatever else, even though you can customize them all to your liking.

It is usually a good idea to try and learn the workflow that was intended by the people who developed this software, you could learn something from trying to use the computer in the same way that the professionals do. Same for Emacs: professional software developers have used it for almost 50 years, the default keyboard shortcuts are set the way they are partially for random historical reasons, but partially because they often make a lot of sense.

If you are interested, please check out my blog series on getting started with Emacs, called Emacs for Professionals

Of course people who pull the power plug to exit Vi would be the type of people to confuse app platforms with operating systems.

Emacs.

Emacs is an app platform in and of itself, and the vanilla installation comes with dozens of its own apps pre-installed. Like how web apps are all programmed in JavaScript, Emacs apps are all programmed in Lisp. All Emacs apps are scriptable and composable in Lisp. Unlike on the web, Emacs encourages you to script your apps to automate things yourself.

Emacs apps are all text based, so they all work equally well in both the GUI and the terminal.

Emacs comes with the following apps pre-installed:

• a text editor for both prose and computer code
• note taking and organizer called Org-mode (sort of like Obsidian, or Logseq)
• a file browser and batch file renamer called Dired
• a CLI console and terminal emulator
• a terminal multiplexer (sort-of like "Tmux")
• a process manager (sort-of like "Htop")
• a simple HTML-only web browser
• man-page and info page browser
• a wrapper around the Grep and Find CLI tools
• a wrapper around SSH called "Tramp"
• e-mail client
• IRC client
• revion control system, including a Git porcelain called "Magit"
• a "diff" tool
• ASCII art drawing program
• keystroke recorder and playback

Some apps that I install into Emacs include:

• "Mastodon.el" Mastodon client
• "Elfeed" RSS feed reader
• "consult" app launcher (sort-of like "Dmenu")

What I do wonder about is to what extent private ownership would still be permitted to exist?

Yeah, I think that is debatable and there are probably a few solutions, since we are only talking about hypothetical society. Just thinking out loud myself now: your example of leasing the tractor to other collectives could be done using money but there would have to be strict regulations to ensure that your lease price was fair, and maybe you would not be to charge interest, or only enough interest to cover the risk of losing the tractor. Or it could all just be done much more informally on a "to each their need" basis and the honor system, and you could maybe take them to court for a new one if they destroyed it or something.

I wish I knew more about how it worked in countries like Vietnam or Cuba, they probably have it all worked out.