Liam on Linux

So, with some of the money from the Great Decluttering I am doing, I bought an SSD and a 1TB hard disk for my big desktop-replacement laptop. It's a big beast & takes 2 x 2.5" hard disks.

I've put my root folder on the SSD and /home on the HD, and merged all the stuff from my Windows home directory and data directory and Linux' /home into one big shared NTFS partition.

For Ubuntu, all I had to do was boot off a recent CD and reinstall GRUB and everything worked. (OK, I had to manually point it at my new swap partition.) These UUID things are excellent.

Windows required finding an install DVD, starting off it and doing a "Startup Repair" but then it was happy.

With Win7 the difference is not all that dramatic. It's quicker, sure, but still takes tens of seconds.

But Ubuntu... *wow*. From GRUB menu to login screen in about 2-3 seconds. From there to desktop in ~1 sec.

Stunning. I had heard it was good, but those poor Windows users just have no idea.

"We took about 10 to 12 man years to do the Ivory chip, and the only comparable chip that was contemporaneous to that was the MicroVAX chip over at DEC. I knew some people that worked on that and their estimates were that it was 70 to 80 man-years to do the microVAX. That in a nutshell was the reason that the Lisp Machine was great."

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw4Wz8Ir0pl1cmNRaHYwdU1wdXM/edit

Source: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=932

I think the more significant long-term question is to ask which of the various Gtk2-based desktops are going to successfully transition to other toolkits.

Apparently, LXDE is switching to Qt:
http://blog.lxde.org/?p=1013

Which leaves the question of how easy it would be for Xfce and Maté to move.
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The only reason why the language should intrude into the discussion is the side-question of whether certain language facilitate or hinder certain types of work.

Look at it from a different angle. For many a working programmer (and writer, believe me), the WWW is a massive distraction. A necessary one, but one that is separate.

What do you need to do, if you are co-working on a significant project? Edit code, obviously. Save it, compile it, run it, probe it with debuggers. Navigate your filesystem, load and view other files, move stuff between them. Occasionally, read and write email, or IRC, or (more historically) newsgroups, to discuss what you're doing. Possibly retrieve files from remote servers or put them there.

The point being, Emacs has extensions to do all this, so that you can do it all in a consistent fashion in a consistent (if horrible) UI, so that you can spend your entire day inside a single Emacs session and never leave and thus mentally never have to change gear.

Emacs, for some of its fans, is their entire OS. Their computer runs something that lets them launch Emacs and has an accessory function of browsing the web.

I don't do this - I don't speak Emacs at all - but I know people who do and really like it.

Well, turn that inside out. Consider an OS whose sole purpose is to do this: a Lisp interpreter running on the metal, which runs Emacs, and inside that, you have all the other functions. No distinction between "OS" and "apps", or between different apps. The OS runs the HLL you're writing natively, so there's no interpreter or compiler or linker. Everything you see is drawn by your editor and is live code that is executing in the environment - you can, if you wish, tweak the email function or the file manager to your taste, or if you want, go grab a new one off the Internet and plug it in instead.
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I guess that it all stems out of a vague feeling of ennui that's been growing in me for years concerning computers.

My Spectrum was an amazing toy (and I do use the word advisedly). I played with CBM PETs and ZX-81s but while interesting they could not do pictures or sound, which were things of more interest to me around 12YO or so. The Spectrum delivered sound, pictures, and a usable BASIC (I switched to Beta BASIC quite early on) at a price well below anything else. The VIC20 was too limited, the C64 had great hardware but a crappy BASIC, the Acorn 8-bits were vastly too expensive, and so on.

Then I got a job and could afford a used Archimedes. Simple, comprehensible OS, *really* good BASIC, wonderful graphics and sound beyond my meagre abilities to exploit and vast CPU power. As the late gkewney@cix said of the IBM PC-AT: "my first experience of Raw Computer Power". Well, for me it was the Archimedes, and dickp@cix's review of it in Personal Computer World was a clincher.

(You can read that here and I recommend it. It's one of the few computer reviews ever to contain quotable lines: http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Aug87_Archimedes.pdf )

Then I went x86. Horrible Byzantine OSes, a wide choice of programming languages but nothing that delivered the simple benefits of BBC BASIC, and I quickly lost interest in programming as a result.

What follows is 20Y of supporting the things instead.
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Package management systems are one of the deepest divides between Linux distros.

One family uses .DEB - Debian and things made from Debian. What makes .DEB good is not the format itself or the basic tools (`dpkg`, `dselect`) that handle it; it's the meta-package-management tool on top, `apt`. Apt has automatic recursive dependency resolution. This means packages much be fetched from carefully-structured repositories, primarily over the Internet.

RPM is much more basic and for years didn't have a meta-manager on top and had no form of dependency resolution. I started to use Red Hat in 1996 or so and stuck with it for 2-3y. Installing something new usually meant going and finding and installing, in the right order, sometimes hundreds of libraries and dependencies. Certainly typically 4-5-6, maybe dozens.

It was a nightmare.
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I have some editing work looming and I need a small portable machine to do it on. My netbook is a bit too small so I've resurrected my 2004 Thinkpad X31.

I've wiped Lubuntu (as the latest versions need PAE support & although I managed to hack it on there, loads of stuff stopped working), and replaced with with LXLE, the "life extension" for Lubuntu 12.04 (which isn't an LTS release).

And I've wiped Linux Mint Debian Edition and replaced it with the latest Crunchbang.

Then wasted the rest of my evening tweaking Crunchbang, so that GPU acceleration works, compositing is turned off, my Thinkpad middle-mouse button works, turned CapsLock into Super and Right-Alt into Compose, added Zram and tweaked it for a single swap file, dropped the colour depth to 16-bit and more. But I think everything's working now. I've replaced Iceweasel with Firefox & Chrome, Abiword/Gnumeric with LibreOffice 4.1 from wheezy-testing, added Pidgin and some odds and sods.

The question is, which will be more use and more pleasant on a 9YO notebook with just a gig of RAM?

Any guesses? :¬)