Posts tagged linux

Posted 3 months ago

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Notmuch 0.1 released

What's new in notmuch 0.1
=========================
This is the first release of the notmuch mail system.

It includes the libnotmuch library, the notmuch command-line
interface, and an emacs-based interface to notmuch.

Love the name and release notes.

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Posted 4 months ago

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The latest version comes out today. I’m writing this yesterday (confusingly) and I’m actually quite excited. Pathetic, isn’t it? Look, bear with me. It’s not easy writing in a passionate fashion about an operating system. It feels a bit like having a favourite type of petrol, or mounting a vigorous advocacy of a particular shade of lightbulb. But dammit, if you work on a desk, these are the environs are our worlds.
Hugo Rifkind, on finding true love in Ubuntu Linux (via vapzone)

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Posted 4 months ago

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First, you must lure a badger to your house under false pretenses and then brutally kill it. If you still want to install Linux after that, let’s talk. “What will you linux fanboys not do?!” - via Vaidehi ShahYes, we just like dead badgers that way. [source]
First, you must lure a badger to your house under false pretenses and then brutally kill it. If you still want to install Linux after that, let’s talk.

“What will you linux fanboys not do?!” - via Vaidehi Shah
Yes, we just like dead badgers that way.

[source]

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Posted 4 months ago

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Just came across Déjà Dup while I was browsing through screenshots of Fedora 13 beta. It’s a simple backup tool for Gnome. It hides the complexity of doing backups the Right Way (encrypted, off-site, and regular) and uses duplicity as the backend. What caught my attention was the dead-simple UI. Can it get any simpler than this? [DejaDup/Screenshots]

Just came across Déjà Dup while I was browsing through screenshots of Fedora 13 beta. It’s a simple backup tool for Gnome.

It hides the complexity of doing backups the Right Way (encrypted, off-site, and regular) and uses duplicity as the backend.

What caught my attention was the dead-simple UI. Can it get any simpler than this?

[DejaDup/Screenshots]

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Posted 4 months ago

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Fedora 13 Beta available for testing

Nice improvements all around. More details here.

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Posted 4 months ago

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The trouble with Linux: it's just not sexy | News | TechRadar UK

But the biggest challenge is sexiness. There’s very little of it in Linux unless you’re an antisocial geek, and products like the Apple’s iPad illustrate this massive divide painfully. As Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, puts it, “Linux can compete with the iPad on price, but where’s the magic?”

Linux has the programmers, the managers, the community, the innovation, the time and the skill. But to succeed in 2010 and the coming decade, what it really needs is a magician or two.

Agree to a certain extent, but the future looks very promising. Now it’s the execution that matters I guess.

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Posted 5 months ago

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Whenever the weather is cloudy/overcast, this applet in the notification area makes it look like the weather is giving me the finger. Or maybe I’m reading too much into this.

Whenever the weather is cloudy/overcast, this applet in the notification area makes it look like the weather is giving me the finger. Or maybe I’m reading too much into this.

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Posted 6 months ago

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As with all things with a concrete target, this design is both huge and small! We don’t claim to have changed the direction of computing forever…. but we hope that this desktop will feel more transparent, more effortless, you’ll stay focused better, yet still understand what’s going on better. And what else do you expect of the core functions of your desktop?

This may amount to a bigger improvement in deep interactions with the UI than any desktop OS in the last decade can boast.

Seth Nickell, on Gnome 3. This and this (among many other reasons) is why I truly believe it’s such an exciting time to be a Linux user today.

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Posted 7 months ago

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The Dock: yay or nay?

I’ve had Docky installed for a couple of months now. Sure, a dock à-la mac at the bottom of the screen looks pretty. I mean really pretty:

pretty!

Yes, it gets noticed all right. Especially with those weather updates. However, there were just too many inconveniences I had to put up with just for a pretty dock. Eventually, it just wasn’t worth it. A dock (like Docky) in its current state just does not fit in my workflow.

I’m not sure how different the dock in OS X is vis-à-vis Docky. I have also tried AWN, but I found it inferior to Docky. So anyway, for the purposes of this post, I’ll just use Docky as an example.

More clicks to do the same thing

The dock works great as a launcher. However, when it comes to window management, the limitations start to show. If I have 2 or more windows of the same app open, I need an extra click to get to what I want.

One click to see the list, and the other to select what I need.

Lack of information

It gets worse when a particular window needs your attention, and that happens frequently in IM apps. The app icon in the dock bounces but it’s not immediately evident which window needs your attention.

Nice, but what just happened?

Turns out you again need an additional click to find out.

I don’t like scrubbing

So you autohide the dock. I don’t want it floating over my apps. That’s well and good. But when the dock comes back up, I have to go through the length of the dock (possibly to get the labels to appear) and find what I need. With the panel, you know where to go and you just do.

Similar icons

This may not be Docky’s fault, but if I have to documents open in OpenOffice Writer, both icons are the same in the dock. There is no way to distinguish one from the other. I need to hover the mouse to get an idea of what that icon represents and again, that is additional work I don’t really want to do.

so what am I looking at here?

I’ve been thinking how to present more information to the user to find things faster in the dock, while maintaining its ease of use and simplicity. And it still needs to look cool I suppose. I’ll try to post some ideas once I get more time to think through them.

What’s your take on docks? How different is the Mac OS X dock from the variants on linux and windows? I’d love to hear any feedback on this.

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Posted 11 months ago

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Fedora!

I just installed Fedora 11 on my work machine a couple of weeks ago (together with the necessary software for work) on my thinkpad, and I’m very impressed with the OS. This is the first time I’m using Fedora on a daily basis to get work done. Until now, it’s usually just been trying out the live CD, but nothing more.

Fedora makes Ubuntu look positively dated in a few ways. The implementation of Pulseaudio is great (although this breaks apps that rely on OSS), Plymouth makes boot look very pretty, and virtualization support is way better. Also, I never thought I’d say this but *gasp* I quite prefer PackageKit over Synaptic.

I’m still discovering new things as I use it everyday. The issues I’ve had are usually because Fedora has moved on to something better, and the apps are yet to catch up. Which brings me to the point that the only problem is Fedora might just be a tad *too* bleeding edge to be recommended for people new to linux and/or who are not willing to spend some time on google if they encounter issues. Ubuntu is more straightforward, and is therefore still more suited for people trying Linux for the first time. Regardless, when everything is ironed out, Fedora is a joy to use. I’ll probably get it on my home machine as well when Fedora 12 rolls around.

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