Desktop

Without a GUI--How to Live Entirely in a Terminal

Bryan Lunduke — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 11:00:00 +0000

Sure, it may be hard, but it is possible to give up graphical interfaces entirely—even in 2019.

About three years back, I attempted to live entirely on the command line for 30 days—no graphical interface, no X Server, just a big-old terminal and me, for a month.

I lasted all of ten days.

Why did I attempt this? What on Earth would compel a man to give up all the trappings and features of modern graphical desktops and, instead, artificially restrict himself to using nothing but text-based, command-line software, as if he were stuck in the early 1980s?

Who knows. Clearly, I make questionable decisions.

But you know, if I'm being honest, the experience was not entirely unpleasant. Sure, I missed certain niceties from the graphical side of things, but there were some distinct benefits to living in a shell. My computers, even the low-powered ones, felt faster (command-line software tends to be a whole lot lighter and leaner than those with a graphical user interface). Plus, I was able to focus and get more work done without all the distractions of a graphical desktop, which wasn't bad.

What follows are the applications I found myself relying upon the most during those fateful ten days, separated into categories. In some cases, these are applications I currently use over (or in addition to) their graphical equivalents.

Quite honestly, it is entirely possible to live completely without a GUI (more or less)—even today, in 2019. And, these applications make it possible—challenging, but possible.

Web Browsing

Plenty of command-line web browsers exist. The classic Lynx typically comes to mind, as does ELinks. Both are capable of browsing basic HTML websites just fine. In fact, the experience of doing so is rather enjoyable. Sure, most websites don't load properly in the "everything is a dynamically loading, JavaScript thingamadoodle" future we live in, but the ones that do load, load fast, and free of distractions, which makes reading them downright enjoyable.

But for me, personally, I recommend w3m.

Figure 1. Browsing Wikipedia with Inline Images Using w3m

w3m supports inline images (via installing the w3m-img package)—seriously, a web browser with image support, inside the terminal. The future is now.

It also makes filling out web forms easy—well, maybe not easy, but at least doable—by opening a configured text editor (such as nano or vim) for entering form text. It feels a little weird the first time you do it, but it's surprisingly intuitive.

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Hello Again, Linux

Richard Mavis — Fri, 31 May 2019 13:26:34 +0000

by Richard Mavis

My first MacBook was the first computer I really loved, but I wasn't happy about the idea of buying a new one. I decided it's important to live your values and to support groups that value the things you do.

After ten years of faithful service, last year the time finally came to retire my MacBook. Not many laptops last ten years—not many companies produce a machine as durable and beautiful as Apple does—but, if one was available, I was willing to invest in a machine that might last me through the next ten years. A lot has changed in ten years—for Apple, for Linux and for myself—so I started looking around.

The Situation

Prior to 2006, I had used only Windows. Around that time, there was a lot of anxiety about its upcoming successor to Windows XP, which at the time was code-named Project Longhorn. My colleagues and I all were dreading it. So, rather than go through all that trouble, I switched to Linux.

However, my first experience with Linux was not great. Although 2006 was The Year of the Linux Desktop (I saw headlines on Digg proclaiming it almost every day), I quickly learned, right after wiping my brand-new laptop's hard drive to make way for Fedora, that maybe it wasn't quite The Year of the Linux Laptop. After a desperate and miserable weekend, I finally got my wireless card working, but that initial trauma left me leery. So, about a year later, when I decided to quit my job and try the digital nomad freelance thing, I bought a MacBook. A day spent hunting down driver files or recompiling my kernel was a day not making money. I needed the assurance and convenience Apple was selling. And it proved a great investment.

During the next decade, I dabbled with Linux. Every year seemed to be The Year of the Linux Desktop—the real one, at last—so on my desktop at work (freelancing wasn't fun for long), I installed Ubuntu, then Debian, then FreeBSD. An article in this journal introduced me to tiling window managers in general and DWM in particular. The first time I felt something like disappointment with my MacBook was after using DWM on Debian for the first time.

Through the years, as my MacBook's hardware failures became increasingly inconvenient, and as my personal preference in software shifted from big beautiful graphical applications to small command-line programs, Linux started to look much more appealing. And, Linux's hardware compatibility had expanded—companies had even started selling laptops with Linux already installed—so I felt reasonably sure I wouldn't need to waste another weekend struggling with a broken wireless connection or risk frying my monitor with a misconfigured Xorg.conf.

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The State of Desktop Linux 2019

Bryan Lunduke — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 12:30:00 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

A snapshot of the current state of Desktop Linux at the start of 2019—with comparison charts and a roundtable Q&A with the leaders of three top Linux distributions.

I've never been able to stay in one place for long—at least in terms of which Linux distribution I call home. In my time as a self-identified "Linux Person", I've bounced around between a number of truly excellent ones. In my early days, I picked up boxed copies of S.u.S.E. (back before they made the U uppercase and dropped the dots entirely) and Red Hat Linux (before Fedora was a thing) from store shelves at various software outlets.

Side note: remember when we used to buy Operating Systems—and even most software—in actual boxes, with actual physical media and actual printed manuals? I still have big printed manuals for a few early Linux versions, which, back then, were necessary for getting just about everything working (from X11 to networking and sound). Heck, sometimes simply getting a successful boot required a few trips through those heavy manuals. Ah, those were the days.

Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE—I spent a good amount of time living in the biggest distributions around (and many others). All of them were fantastic. Truly stellar. Yet, each had their own quirks and peculiarities.

As I bounced from distro to distro, I developed a strong attachment to just about all of them, learning, as I went, to appreciate each for what it was. Just the same, when asked which distribution I recommend to others, my brain begins to melt down. Offering any single recommendation feels simply inadequate.

Choosing which one to call home, even if simply on a secondary PC, is a deeply personal choice.

Maybe you have an aging desktop computer with limited RAM and an older, but still absolutely functional, CPU. You're going to need something light on system resources that runs on 32-bit processors.

Or, perhaps you work with a wide variety of hardware architectures and need a single operating system that works well on all of them—and standardizing on a single Linux distribution would make it easier for you to administer and update all of them. But what options even are available?

To help make this process a bit easier, I've put together a handy set of charts and graphs to let you quickly glance and find the one that fits your needs (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. Distribution Comparison Chart I

Figure 2. Distribution Comparison Chart II

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Weekend Reading: Qubes

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 17 Nov 2018 12:29:12 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Qubes OS is a security-focused operating system that, as tech editor Kyle Rankin puts it, "is fundamentally different from any other Linux desktop I've used". Join us this weekend in reading Kyle's multi-part series on all things Qubes.

Secure Desktops with Qubes: Introduction

In this first article, I provide an overview of what Qubes is, some of the approaches it takes that are completely different from what you might be used to on a Linux desktop and some of its particularly interesting security features. In future articles, I'll give more how-to guides on installing and configuring it and how to use some of its more-advanced features.

Secure Desktops with Qubes: Installation

This is the second in a multipart series on the Qubes operating system. In my first article, I gave an overall introduction to Qubes and how it differs from most other desktop Linux distributions, namely in the way it focuses on compartmentalizing applications within different VMs to limit what attackers have access to in the event they compromise a VM. This allows you to use one VM for regular Web browsing, another for banking and a different one for storing your GPG keys and password manager. In this article, I follow up with a basic guide on how to download and install Qubes, along with a general overview of the desktop and the various default VM types.

Secure Desktops with Qubes: Compartmentalization

This is the third article in my series about Qubes. In the first two articles, I gave an overview about what Qubes is and described how to install it. One of the defining security features of Qubes is how it lets you compartmentalize your different desktop activities into separate VMs. The idea behind security by compartmentalization is that if one of your VMs is compromised, the damage is limited to just that VM.

Secure Desktops with Qubes: Extra Protection

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The Asus Eee: How Close Did the World Come to a Linux Desktop?

Jeff Siegel — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 13:30:00 +0000

by Jeff Siegel

It was white, not much bigger than my hands held side by side, weighed about as much as a bottle of wine, and it came in a shiny, faux-leather case. It was the $199 Asus Eee 901, and I couldn't believe that a computer could be that powerful, that light and that much fun.

This is the story of the brief, shining history of the Asus Eee, the first netbook—a small, cheap and mostly well-made laptop that dominated the computer industry for two or three years about a decade go. It's not so much that the Eee was ahead of its time, which wasn't that difficult in an industry then dominated by pricey and bulky laptops that didn't always have a hard drive and by desktop design hadn't evolved much past the first IBM 8086 box.

Rather, the Eee was ahead of everyone's time. It ran a Linux operating system with a tabbed interface and splashy icons, and the hardware included wireless, Bluetooth, a webcam and an SSD hard drive—all in a machine that weighed just 2.5 pounds. In this, it teased many of the concepts that tech writer Mark Wilson says we take for granted in today's cloud, smartphone and Chromebook universe.

The Eee was so impressive that even Microsoft, whose death grip on the PC world seemed as if it would never end, took notice. As everyone from Dell to HP to Samsung to Toshiba to Sony to Acer to one-offs and "never-weres" raced netbooks into production, Microsoft offered manufacturers a version of Windows XP (and later a truncated Windows 7) to cram onto the machines. Because we can't have the masses running a Linux OS, can we?

"The Eee gave regular people something they couldn't have before", says Dan Ackerman, a longtime section editor at CNET who wrote some of the website's original Eee and netbook reviews. "Laptops had always been ridiculously expensive. The Eee wasn't, and it gave regular people a chance to buy a laptop that was smaller and more portable and that they could be productive with. I always gave Asus credit—they understood the role of form and function."

Netbook History

The computer world never had really seen anything like the first Eee, which didn't even have a name when it was launched in 2007 (although it later would be called both the 701 and the 4G). In fact, say those who reviewed the 701, it wasn't so much a product but a proof of concept—that Asus could make something that small and that cheap that worked.

There had been small laptops before, of course, like the Intel Classmate PC and the OLPC X0-1, each part of the One Laptop per Child project. But those were specialized machines designed to bring computing and the internet to students throughout the world, and not necessarily consumer products.

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System76 Announces American-Made Desktop PC with Open-Source Parts

Bryan Lunduke — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 15:01:36 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

Early in 2017—nearly two years ago—System76 invited me, and a handful of others, out to its Denver headquarters for a sneak peek at something new they'd been working on.

We were ushered into a windowless, underground meeting room. Our phones and cameras confiscated. Seriously. Every word of that is true. We were sworn to total and complete secrecy. Assumedly under penalty of extreme death...though that part was, technically, never stated.

Once the head honcho of System76, Carl Richell, was satisfied that the room was secure and free from bugs, the presentation began.

System76 told us the company was building its own desktop computers. Ones that it designed themselves. From-scratch cases. With wood. And inlaid metal. What's more, these designs would be open. All built right there in Denver, Colorado.

We were intrigued.

Then they showed them to us, and we darn near lost our minds. They were gorgeous. We all wanted them.

But they were not ready yet. This was early on in the design and engineering, and they were looking for feedback—to make sure System76 was on the right track.

They were.

Flash-forward to today (November 1, 2018), and these Linux-powered, made in America desktop machines are finally being unveiled to the world as the Thelio line (which they've been teasing for several weeks with a series of sci-fi themed stories).

The Thelio comes in three sizes:

Thelio (aka "small") — max 32GB RAM, 24TB storage.
Thelio Major (aka "medium") — max 128GB RAM, 46TB storage.
Thelio Massive (aka "large") — max 768GB RAM, 86TB storage.

All three sport the same basic look: part black metal, part wood (with either maple or walnut options) with rounded side edges. The cases open with a single slide up of the outer housing, with easy swapping of components. Lots of nice little touches, like a spot for in-case storage of screws that can be used in securing drives.

In an awesomely nerdy touch, the rear exhaust grill shows the alignment of planets in the solar system...at UNIX Epoch time. Also known as January 1, 1970. A Thursday.

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FOSS Project Spotlight: Nitrux, a Linux Distribution with a Focus on AppImages and Atomic Upgrades

Nitrux Latinoamericana S.C. — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 13:41:37 +0000

by Nitrux Latinoa…

Nitrux is a Linux distribution with a focus on portable, application formats like AppImages. Nitrux uses KDE Plasma 5 and KDE Applications, and it also uses our in-house software suite Nomad Desktop.

What Can You Use Nitrux For?

Well, just about anything! You can surf the internet, word-process, send email, create spreadsheets, listen to music, watch movies, chat, play games, code, do photo editing, create content—whatever you want!

Nitrux's main feature is the Nomad Desktop, which aims to extend Plasma to suit new users without compromising its power and flexibility for experts. Nomad's features:

The System Tray replaces the traditional Plasma version.
An expanded notification center allows users to manage notifications in a friendlier manner.
Easier access to managing networks: quick access to different network settings without having to search for them.
Improved media controls: a less confusing way to adjust the application's volume and integrated media controls.
Calendar and weather: displays the traditional Plasma calendar but also adds the ability to see appointments and the ability to configure location settings to display the weather.
Custom Plasma 5 artwork: including Look and Feel, Plasma theme, Kvantum theme, icon theme, cursor themes, SDDM themes, Konsole theme and Aurorae window decoration.

Nitrux is a complete operating system that ships the essential apps and services for daily use: office applications, PDF reader, image editor, music and video players and so on. We also include non-KDE or Qt applications like Chromium and LibreOffice that together create a friendly user experience.

Available Out of the Box

Nitrux includes a selection of applications carefully chosen to perform the best when using your computer:

Dolphin: file manager.
Kate: advanced text editor.
Ark: archiving tool.
Konsole: terminal emulator.
Chromium: web browser.
Babe: music player.
VLC: multimedia player.
LibreOffice: open-source office suite.
Showimage: image viewer.

Explore a Universe of Apps in Nitrux

The NX Software Center is a free application that provides Linux users with a modern and easy way to manage the software installed on their open-source operating systems. Its features allow you to search, install and manage AppImages. AppImages are faster to install, easier to create and safer to run. AppImages aim to work on any distribution or device, from IoT devices to servers, desktops and mobile devices.

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Edit PDFs with Xournal

Kyle Rankin — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 12:00:00 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

Forget all of those magical command-line PDF incantations and edit your PDFs easily with Xournal.

Somehow, despite all the issues with proprietary clients and the history of security issues with Acrobat, PDFs have become the de facto standard for your average print-ready document shared around the office. Sure, people might use some kind of open document format or a cloud editor if they intend to edit a document, but if the goal is to print the document or lock its contents in place, most people these days will export it to a PDF.

Reading PDFs is typically fine on Linux, because Linux has plenty of applications that can open PDFs for viewing, and you easily can print PDFs under Linux as well. Even Adobe supplied a proprietary (and somewhat outdated) port of its Acrobat Reader for Linux. Some distributions also offer the ability to create a special software printer that converts any print job sent to it into a local PDF file.

The problem comes when people want to turn read-only print-ready PDFs into read-write documents you need to modify. As more people work in paperless offices with strictly digital documents and fewer people own fax machines, you are more likely to find official documents like contracts show up in your INBOX in PDF format. These contracts likely were created with a proprietary PDF editor tool, and they usually have blanks for you to fill in and often signature lines so you can add a real signature. Unfortunately, for the longest time, even if you were using Adobe's own Linux port of Acrobat Reader, you couldn't reliably edit these PDFs, and you certainly couldn't easily add a real signature.

A lot of Linux applications claim the ability to edit PDFs from graphical tools like GIMP, or the aforementioned Acrobat Reader or tools like Inkscape. In the past, I've even gone so far as to use command-line tools to convert a PDF into multiple pages of a different format, edit that format, then use the command-line tools to convert it back to a PDF.

Then I discovered Xournal. Xournal is a graphical tool that's designed for note-taking and sketching either with a keyboard and mouse or even with a tablet and stylus. This program is pretty common, and you should be able to install it in any major Linux distribution, but otherwise, you can download the software from its Sourceforge page.

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Organizing a Market for Applications

Sriram Ramkrishna — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 13:08:08 +0000

by Sriram Ramkrishna

The "Year of the Desktop" has been a perennial call to arms that's sunken into a joke that's way past its expiration date. We frequently talk about the "Year of the Desktop", but we don't really talk about how we would achieve that goal. What does the "Year of the Desktop" even look like?

What it comes down to is applications—rather, a market for applications. There is no market for applications because of a number of cultural artifacts that began when the Free Software was just getting up on wobbly legs.

Today, what we have is a distribution-centric model. Software is distributed by an OSV (operating system vendor), and users get their software directly from there via whatever packaging mechanism that OSV supports. This model evolved, because in the early-to-mid 1990s, those OSVs existed to compile the kernel and userspace into a cohesive product. Packaging of applications was the next step as a convenience factor to save users from having to compile their own applications, which always was a hit-or-miss endeavor as developers had different development environment from the users. Ultimately, OSVs enjoyed being gatekeepers as part of keeping developers honest and fixing issues that were unique to their operating system. OSVs saw themselves as agents representing users to provide high-quality software, and there was a feeling that developers were not to be trusted, as of course, nobody knows the state of their operating system better than they would.

However, this model represented a number of challenges to both commercial and open-source developers. For commercial developers, the problem became how to maximize their audience as the "Linux" market consisted of a number of major OSVs and an uncountable number of smaller niche distributions. Commercial application developers would have to develop multiple versions of their own application targeted at various major distributions for fear of missing out on a subset of users. Over time, commercial application developers would settle on using Ubuntu or a compressed tar file hosted on their website. Various distributions would pick up these tar balls and re-package them for their users. If you were an open-source developer, you had the side benefit of distributions picking up your work automatically for you and packaging them if you successfully enjoyed a large following. But they faced the same dilemma.

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Why the Failure to Conquer the Desktop Was Great for GNU/Linux

Glyn Moody — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 11:30:00 +0000

by Glyn Moody

AI: open source's next big win.

Canonical recently launched Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It's an important release. In part, that's because Canonical will support it for five years, making it one of the relatively rare LTS products in Ubuntu's history. Ubuntu 18.04 also marks a high-profile return to GNOME as the default desktop, after a few years of controversial experimentation with Unity. The result is regarded by many as the best desktop Ubuntu so far (that's my view too, for what it's worth). And yet, the emphasis at launch lay elsewhere. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical and founder of Ubuntu, said:

Multi-cloud operations are the new normal. Boot-time and performance-optimised images of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on every major public cloud make it the fastest and most efficient OS for cloud computing, especially for storage and compute-intensive tasks like machine learning.

The bulk of the official 18.04 LTS announcement is about Ubuntu's cloud computing features. On the main web site, Ubuntu claims to be "The standard OS for cloud computing", citing (slightly old) research that shows "70% of public cloud workloads and 54% of OpenStack clouds" use it. Since Canonical is a privately held company, it doesn't publish a detailed breakdown of its operations, just a basic summary. That means it's hard to tell just how successful the cloud computing strategy is proving. But, the fact that Shuttleworth is now openly talking about an IPO—not something to be undertaken lightly—suggests that there is enough good news to convince investors to throw plenty of money at Canonical when the prospectus spells out how the business is doing.

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