I find that the best way to do this is to just VNC to a windows or Mac dedicated slave computer to do graphic arts work. VNC is so good nowadays that I can use my QHD phone screen as a second monitor for all my Adobe apps- and the lag nowadays is almost non-existent thanks to super fast wifi.
Funny thing is I use my i3wm environment on 16gb of RAM and a 4k screen. I'm actually migrating to rat poison because it's so incredibly simple and basic that it has been making me drool. I mean, look at the source code. It doesn't get much simpler than that for a tiled WM.
Load the entire GHC garbage collected runtime just for my window manager? Isn't this the same philosophy that causes people to use Electron? And that results in unnecessarily large memory footprints and runtime performance penalties?
I'd prefer a wild-west type of world where certs are decentralized and "blind trust" towards big authorities becomes optional and still there as a reinforcement, but not necessary and definitely not required to communicate securely.
I mean- if there are adversaries out there trying to hack our communications- then we need to let these adversaries try so that we can engage them head on so that their methods become published, public, and thoroughly analyzed by the people in charge of strengthening our protocols.
This approach would be like fracturing the bone to make it stronger- we allow nation state hack us in order to figure out ways to stop and prevent such hacks using open and transparent software alone. Trusting any group of people anywhere "just because they're trust worthy" feels like a variable defining <the contents of its data> as equal to <the contents of its data>. It just doesn't make sense for a variable to trust itself "just because" because then I wonder if something fishy is going on under the hood.
I must be rare because I wouldn't mind being treated as less than human. McDonald's was one of my first jobs- and one thing I learned there was that I can chose one of two things: (1)be upset that incompetent bosses are treating me like shit and move on to another job without having learned anything, or (2)I can simply not care about Michael Scott-type managers and just focus, like a robot, on getting really good at my job. Then, in the future, I can move up and become one of the best managers anyone has ever seen thanks to knowing what not to do.
In my opinion, people care too much about work politics. Yes people suck, but sucky people will be everywhere. Learning to cope with difficult people is a skill that everybody absolutely needs to learn at some point in their lives.
> Yes people suck, but sucky people will be everywhere. Learning to cope with difficult people is a skill that everybody absolutely needs to learn at some point in their lives.
I agree with that. And on the point of managers: I’ve had my fair share of shitty/toxic managers. So I guess I spent a decent amount of time being treated that way and eventually it wears thin and you start trying to look for a more humane workplace rather than chasing money or “impact”.
serious question: why do people insist on using Ubuntu for low-end hardware like this and the PI??? Ubuntu is a cluttered nightmare full of so much unecessary stuff. Why not use a minimalistic non-GUI barebones version of Debian and build your OS up from there?
I agree. I'm a fan of headless Debian, and running i3wm when needed. (I currently run headless Ubuntu, but only because Debian on the Pine is no longer maintained)
If you need multimedia and heavy web browsing, run Android. That's what it was designed for.
People who say that the raspeberry PI is "bad" and "barely useable" say so because Ubuntu + Chrome + botnet social networking sites tend to slow your PI to a crawl.
If you configure i3, compton, and build your own distro from scratch WITHOUT ubuntu, then the rpi can actually be very fast and snappy for programming.
If this laptop is anything like the raspberry pi, then it will require LOTS of customization to get the OS to work right. But once it's configured just right and you stay away from botnet browsers and sites like FB and IG, then the pi is actually quite nice.
Yup, just _not_ using a massive DE goes most of the way for improving performance, especially on little devices like this. i3wm is great for this because it's a tiling window manager for both the masses and for the expert.
Also once you are using i3 then using Debian instead of Ubuntu makes little difference to the user while going a fair way to removing a lot of bloat.
However suggesting linux from scratch is a bit extreme, it can be fun but you can get 99% of the benefits with i3 alone and maybe choosing a distro with a lighter HD footprint. Building your own OS is a lot of work for most people on the otherhand, and will scare people off your otherwise sound suggestion :P
Personally, I don't think laptops like the Pinebook should ever be used by the masses because, like you said, building your own OS from scratch is difficult, even for the tech savvy! And no I'm not talking about compiling your own Gentoo yourself. What I mean is just starting with a barebones distro with NOTHING installed, then sudo apt-get intsall your carefully selected list of packages- followed by tons and tons of googling and man pages to figure out how to configure your config files in just the right way.
This is how I learned linux- the hard way. My powerful windows 10 workstation died one day, and I decided to actually try using my abandoned rpI for day to day use. It took a LOT of googling, but I finally figured out how to make my pi enjoyable after close to half a year's worth of effort.
I'm definitely buying this laptop when I get paid because I am one of the few people out there who's masochistic enough to enjoy pi-like devices. This laptop is EXACTLY what I have been looking for.
Maybe you mean nothing more than what comes with the distro's install? In that case a clean Ubuntu counts? I think you should rethink what you have in mind; maybe you mean a distribution with few default packages and minimal preconfigured settings? Something like Arch?
You're right, I probably used the wrong words there. By barebones distro, I actually meant "headless debian with minimal packages configured to fit nicely inside 1/3rd of a 32 Gb SD card". My main problem with Ubuntu is that even Xubuntu felt too bloated for me under raspberry pi. I can't even fit Xubuntu into a 64Gb SD card without running out of space. What do all those extra gigs do? They sure as hell don't make my rpI faster that's for sure.
yeah, once you move away from any kind of "it comes preinstalled with a DE" type distro, moving to a headless barebones distro is easy, and you can mostly take your configs with you... xorg is also so frickin easy these days. I've yet to try something even more minimal like arch or.. from scratch! but maybe one day with enough time :)
I think The trick to helping others though is to show it can be done in stages, because trying to learn everything at once is too hard, it's easy to forget how long it took to acquire all of the knowledge and skill that make it seem easy to set up a bare bones linux distro into something comfortable and yet lightweight.
For most people I'd advise: Ubuntu (cos the web will help), then find your lightweight desktop of choice by installing and experimenting along side... then try to replicate it on barebones (or ubuntu server, mostly just involves adding xorg to your install list)... then experiment with more lightweight distros... and if tinkering with your desktop is not satisfying enough then you will no doubt go down the from scratch route as well eventually but at that point you don't need people telling you what to do. The thing that's lost with my seemingly simple suggestion is that you will learn so much by yourself while trying to achieve this, but without sacrificing your productivity.
Do you reckon a recent RPi is good enough for Emacsing away, with the occasional PDF-reading and watching videos w/ mpv? I think having a desktop computer with a wider monitor would be a nice improvement for me, given using a laptop for long times is not really ergonomical. If I can have a decent enough desktop experience with such a setup, that'd be very nice.
PDF? PDFs and the web will be laggy unless you set up a compositor like Compton to speed things up. There's enough GPU power in the PI to set up decent 2d compositing with transparencies.
Videos? I wouldn't count on it because youtube videos are still choppy for me. Even after a ton of work, I still get light choppiness on 320p video. I haven't tried local video files yet, though I assume local files might perform better than web videos. I mean, gifs and webms play smoothly without choppiness, so why not mpv video?
One of the biggest flaws in the raspberry pi is the USB Micro port. If your USB micro cable is broken and unreliable, then your PI will get extremely slow and may even crash a lot due to the flickering power supply. Your pi won't tell you what's wrong either, which makes troubleshooting a pain until you figure out that the lightning bolt icon on your screen means power problem.
If you like linux and tinkering, I would highly recommend you get a pi. Just don't expect a pi to work out of the box. Most distros are so bloated and the pi is so limited, that you have to trim everything down for the pi to be even remotely enjoyable.
If you wish to send me a download link to an example video file of yours, I can play it on my setup for you and let you know how well the video performs.
Thanks a lot! I'm quite comfortable with Gnu/Linux and FreeBSD, and I do have a Pi, though it sits there on the shelf running a couple cron jobs and being a CUPS server. I've never tried it for desktop computing tho (I don't think I've ever used it unless through ssh). I'll definitely test it out when I have a monitor handy (I'll either use a Pi or connect the monitor to my laptop, I really need a screen at my eye level, I'm fed up with the neck aches because I was too caught up with reading a paper, or more often, fiddling with my emacs config).
WRT PDFs and web, I use qutebrowser w/o JS, which is lightweight, and most PDFs are just papers with nothing fancy (I'm a humanities student / prospective researcher). I can take the choppyness if it's not unusable.
The videos are just any video on Youtube. Mpv is a program similar to mplayer, and I use it to watch any video on the disk or use it like "mpv <youtube url>" to view videos from youtube (it even has titles and can show progress, really nice), I guess you mistook it for a video format.
Thanks. I'd probably put FreeBSD on it though. I can't use it because I can't get suspend and resume working on laptops, but I miss it like Odysseus misses Ithaka. One of the few software I actually love, it is...
I recently switched to Gnome 3 (5th of march, tells me mercurial), and it just crawled my laptop, w/ 4G mem and i3 cpu @ 1.80 GHz. That's not super fast, but it freezing with merely Firefox and Emacs running was unacceptable. I tended to blame that on Firefox, but when I switched to Qutebrowser I understood that it was not it, and decided to see what was the cause. I saw that my fairly minimal Gnome 3 DE (i.e. the session and nm-applet, no extensions) took half of the resources. Six days ago I switched to Xmonad, boom, the machine hasn't used the swap since. Even when I start Chromium for some silly websites life makes me use. Even when I have Chromium, mpv, Qutebrowser and Emacs all open at once. With Gnome I'd probably have to kill Emacs in such a session a couple times...
Gnome 3 is really really bad. It is so bad that it actually makes me want to use Windows 10 instead.
Context: i've been using Xfce4 for the last 4-5 years and recently had to use Gnome3.x because of RHEL. Since I've a recent Gnome, I decided to also try a recent KDE.
Well...
- XFCE manages to be consistently fast and overall a joy to use
- KDE is getting usable again after the KDE4.0 mess. Still too much gummy by default, but it's so customizable that you can turn off most of the trash that is enabled by default.
- Gnome really looks like it has been designed for and tested against mentally challenged people. It's infuriating, most of its utilities lack menus and basic options/settings, to the point where having a GUI is more of an impediment rathen than being something useful.
I am very worried by the fact that Ubuntu is reverting back to Gnome.
In your opinion, what is your criteria for declaring that a platform is "bad for you" and "an unhealthy habit"?
Personally, I spend ALOT of my free time lurking 4chan's /g/ "technology" board, 4chan's /ck/ cooking board, and a carefully curated list of my favorite food and technology related subreddits on Reddit. I personally consider my addictions to be quite healthy because I learn and absorb a tremendous amount of information from sites that focus more on "actual content that matters" and less on worshiping the same small group of narcissistic acquaintances that congregate on platforms where "disliking" content is frowned upon.
Sure there's a lot of stupid crap on 4chan and reddit is full of corporate and government shills, but the internet has grown SO MUCH lately that the signal to noise ratio isn't as bad as it was in the early 2000s. My only problem nowadays is that I don't have enough time in a day to read/watch/comment on all the important stuff I find on the net. Compare that to the early 2000's, when useful information on the internet was so scarce, that I had to use minesweeper in my highschool computer labs to pass the time.
I for one am happy at how much content there is on the internet now. If you're smart, you can curate your own nonstop stream of "useful" content without that much effort. Problem is that you have to reject content that is curated by big businesses like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and program your own method of retrieving things that matter.
People will always complain about the exponential growth of information. Look at newspapers and the printing press. I'm sure that people reacted the same way towards pocket watches and newspapers as people nowadays are reacting to smartphones and social media. Some people just have addictive personalities in general, and will blame not being productive on whoever's in charge of "information" at any given moment.
Not the parent, but I would say that a platform should somehow add value to your life to be "good for you". HN, Reddit (depending on where you go), other sites etc can entertain, teach, and connect you with interesting people. Social networks I've found are value detractors for me because:
A. I don't care what 95% of people I am connected with are doing, and I regularly talk to the people I care about anyway.
B. I can't have any meaningful discussions on them
C. They are dominated by high volume posters who tend to be very opinionated. Very opinionated people tend to have extreme opinions which are usually wrong and aren't particularly interesting to me.
D. The networks present a false sense of reality which lowers happiness. Everyone always posts their highlight reel which makes you feel like the whole world is killing it constantly and you aren't.
> D. The networks present a false sense of reality which lowers happiness. Everyone always posts their highlight reel which makes you feel like the whole world is killing it constantly and you aren't.
This! I can resonate with all of your points. But this one is one of their major weaknesses.
> The networks present a false sense of reality which lowers happiness. Everyone always posts their highlight reel which makes you feel like the whole world is killing it constantly and you aren't.
If this is what happens in your feed, you have a shallower and less genuine set of social media connections than I do. I get highlights, sure, but just as much lowlights, and quotidian events that don't meet either description.
I suspect that the people who connect with networks of people who do exclusive self-image-burnishing social media posts would also connect with people that provide the same kind of fronts in other venues (including in-person), though I'll also grant that if you tend to connect predominantly with such people, social media magnifies their effect, as it's easier to consistently present an image online than in person.)
> you have a shallower and less genuine set of social media connections
I don't think you have to be "shallow" to be biased towards posting highlights.
You spend a nice vacation in Asia? Your kid managed an important accomplishment? Found a restaurant that's awesome? Aren't these the kind of things that you naturally have the tendency to share?
In contrast, you spent your saturday doing nothing at home? Your kid did an average thing? You ate food that's just "okay"? Am I shallow if I don't like posting these things? Sure some of the days I might want to post about some average or bad things, but I think I'm still biased towards the highlights
As to point C, I think the problem you have is that you are following or associating with people whose opinions do not agree with your own. There are many opinionated people who are insightful, intelligent and interesting. Volume of posting does not always imply 'wrongness'. Similarly, regarding point A, why are you even connected to these 95% of people you don't care about? Perhaps if you curated or controlled who you connected to better you would find social networks much more valuable.
As someone who cooks a lot, I was curious what /ck/ could have to offer. I hadn't been to 4chan in years. I'm not sure how this board has tremendous amounts of useful information.
/ck/ is actually one of the sanest places on 4chan, in my personal opinion. It's not the nicest place on earth- I mean, it is 4chan, so memes and rudeness aren't against the rules. Couple that with optional anonymity, and you're bound to encounter some rough edges here and there.
Having said that though- I've been there since 2007, and I used to get lots of compliments for posting original content (pictures of food being cooked). People love to talk about food there- plus you get to hear actual line cooks talking about things. You don't have to wait forever to get a reply on a thread, and good threads (like costco food threads) can go up to hundreds of replies before being pruned.
All in all, I don't hate the place. My usual bookmarks each day are: 1) HN 2) Reddit 3) /ck/ + /g/ + /fit/ 4) google news (only if important stuff is hapenning in the world, though I Have to admit that the fastest place to get instantaneous information nowadays is /b/)
this makes me sad because this is the idea I've been building in my head for a long time now. :( I need to make a free and open source alternative based off of my ideas..
i3 and ratpoison are tiled window managers for Linux that make your whole computer behave like vim does. If you really are interested in simplifying the amount of work you do- you should consider abandoning the normal "stacked cluttered windows" paradigm in exchange for something that requires less pointless mouse work to achieve the same amount of work faster.
Most monitors have enough real estate to where alt-tabbing is not only unecessary, but counter productive and distracting. Its like using your foot to operate the gas pedal 100% of the time instead of using cruise control to drive hours in a straight line.
