linux

OK, SO NOW WHAT I was going to try and finish this, but … naw.

HOW DO WE DEFINE “THE OS”, ANYWAY? I used to get pretty stroppy about things like “Pop! OS” or “Elementary”, both of which are just re-skinned Ubuntu, but from a this blog perspective, I’ll just say that the “OS” is the stack from kernel to UI that serves as the functional basis for providing services and applications for getting things done. In that sense, I think it’s entirely fair to consider Ubuntu as distinct from Debian as distinct from Gentoo or Arch or whatever – the UI aspect of all of them are pretty different one from the other, and at the end of the day, I am a user of my machine, so the UI is pretty much the endgame, here....

FIRST THINGS FIRST The most important thing to keep in mind is that this is a desktop computer, not a laptop. I don’t like laptops – while the engineering of modern laptops is pretty remarkable, you spend so much of your engineering budget on the compromises inherent in the form factor, to enable a use case that I don’t care about (mobility). So, I’m sure this whole exercise would look pretty different if I were doing this on my MacBook or something....

LINUX, I GUESS? So for reasons that defy explanation, I have decided that I need to live on Linux, or at least, make a go of it. I have been a Mac user almost exclusively for decades, but as I have aged, my asks of a computer have largely shriveled down to Emacs, and a web browser. I still appreciate the craft of a lot of the software I use on the Mac; and I still think that Apple’s hardware is basically best in class, but I’m distant enough from needing e....