Reviving a very old project

[liv]

So nearly 5 years ago, I hatched a plan to get involved in Open Source stuff. And it completely foundered because I tried to install Ubuntu on a netbook and didn't really even get started. Today, I tried again and actually got somewhere.

I'm really embarrassed that I didn't try again for such a long time, but I let myself get blocked on the expectation that it was going to be frustrating. I'm a scientist, I'm generally comfortable with failure and troubleshooting. Indeed, it was my plan to identify and document and report what went wrong in order to make it easier for other people in future. However, I didn't really even get to the stage of failing, just didn't get started at all. And it sort of turned into an obligation, I made the mistake of telling myself I should try again, and I rebelled against my own intention.

And I know the pandemic isn't really the right time for that big project you've been putting off for ages. But it isn't the wrong time either. I have a bit more time and having another go at scaling the cliff face might be less appealing than any number of social things but it's more appealing than just scrolling through Twitter.

There's another motivation, which is that my Windows laptop is slowly dying. It's 7 years old (and wasn't the latest tech when I got it) and ridiculously underpowered for modern anything, and I've already resurrected it once. I might be able to fix the cooling problem again, but the touchpad is failing in awkward ways, and I don't think it has much scope to upgrade the hardware eg add RAM or replace the hard disk. Also it is pretty irresponsible to continue running Win7 on an internet-connected machine, and I find myself deeply reluctant to either 'upgrade' to Win10 or get a new machine infested with Win10. I have far less specific need for Windows these days, so if I'm going to get a new computer I might as well use the opportunity to escape from Microsoft's clutches. But I don't want to spend serious money on a new machine until I'm confident I can actually adapt to a new OS.

So. I determined I was going to have another go at converting a spare laptop (a cheap HP machine I bought last time I thought my main home machine was dying) to Ubuntu. It turns out that waiting five years was in some ways exactly the right answer. The Ubuntu website these days has far more helpful instructions compared to last time I looked, and I just followed the step by step instructions and bingo. So I made a bootable USB stick, which was almost trivially easy. And then I attached it to Purple Eyes, and it took a few tries to get Windows to break out of its usual start cycle and recognize a boot source, but that was the only hitch. I told it to delete everything, including Windows as well as all the files (which are all backed up anyway) rather than trying to create any partitions or dual boot cleverness. It felt surprisingly good to nuke Windows! I even removed the sticker from the chassis.

Result: I have a pure, completely default Ubuntu machine, which has the minor bonus of being shiny and purple. And my Win7 laptop isn't actually dead yet so I can keep them running in parallel. I am hoping to switch over to using Purple Eyes II as my main machine and just get myself into Ubuntu habits, as well as documenting the steps I take to set up an environment I can comfortably use. And I'll see if I still need a new laptop after a few months of working on the old machine with semi-new brain.

If anyone wants to recommend me software, please go ahead. I have literally nothing other than whatever's in the default setup. And I have little knowledge of what I'm missing. I mean, I could try to recreate everything I use in Windows but that slightly defeats the object.

Comments

[hilarita]

Yeah - the hardest part of most Ubuntu installs these days is usually trying to persuade the goddamned computer to boot off USB. (All bets are off if you're trying to install it on Mac hardware, though...)

If you're already using some Open Source software on Windows, you may already be using things. I use LibreOffice as my word processing tool, vim as my text editor. Install Simon Tatham's games! The audio player that comes with Ubuntu works fine, though warning: sound may be a deeply frustrating thing to get working right.

I use Thunderbird as my mail client and my calendar. I mostly use Firefox for web browsing, but have Chromium installed for all the things that barf at Firefox.

And then there's all the junk I've installed for programming... but that's a very different question.

Yay for trying to escape the Beast of Redmond!

[toothycat]

That was pretty much my experience a few years ago. I loathe Windows 10, and when my trusty Win 7 laptop bit the dust (helped along by the "repair" shop) I installed Ubuntu on my new laptop. It is a dual boot, but the Windows OS isn't allowed to connect to the internet for safety reasons. I can't actually remember the last time I used it. I found Ubuntu very convenient in lots of ways, and Wine is doing brilliantly with the few things I can't get replacements for :)

[theandrewhickey]

A few recommendations:
If you're doing much in the way of science *writing*, you'll probably want at least to try LyX. It's a word processor which uses LaTeX as its back-end, so is eminently suitable for creating scientific papers, but I've also used it for writing books, scripts, and all sorts of other things. Some people find it has a steep learning curve, purely because it's not Word or a Wordalike, but once you get used to it you find it's much more sensible than Word, and doesn't fight you in the myriad little ways Word (or Word clones like LibreOffice) do. It also has the most comprehensive documentation of anything I've ever experienced -- it has separate manuals for typesetting musical scores, braille, Feynman diagrams, linguistics (I managed to help cosmolinguist get some diagrams done for a paper the other day, despite neither of us having used LyX for linguistics before, because the documentation was so clear), and more. I wrote two books in LibreOffice and could feel it fighting me every step of the way. I've written eighteen more since I installed LyX, and using it was a pleasure.


You'll probably want to install Glimpse rather than the default image editor. Glimpse is a fork of that default, which doesn't have the ableist name, and which also has a consistent (and much more user-friendly) interface which isn't broken every five seconds by the devs deciding to change how everything works.

If you use ebooks at all, you'll want to install calibre, a library system for ebooks that is to the ebook what iTunes or similar is to music. If you use DRMd ebooks and are ethically comfortable with stripping DRM, you will also want to install the DRM-stripping calibre plugin at apprenticealf.wordpress.com . Using that plugin will involve some fiddling, depending on which ebook providers you use, and you will probably have to install WiNE, a Windows emulator (which may be in the default Ubuntu install, I use a different distro). WiNE is a useful one anyway if you have any Windows-only software you want to continue to use.

There are several MP3 library programs, all of them suboptimal. I find Rhythmbox the least-suboptimal.

VLC is the best program by far for watching downloaded video, or for watching DVDs if your machine has an optical drive.


Other software I find or have found useful -- I don't know your specific needs:
youtube-dl -- a command-line program for downloading videos from YouTube for offline viewing or editing
Keepass2 -- password manager
Rosegarden -- a MIDI program that lets you write music as a score and will play it. Warning -- doing anything involving MIDI is a royal pain in GNU/Linux. This one has the most user-friendly interface, but is flaky on the back-end.
LMMS -- the opposite of Rosegarden. Heavily featureful sampling/sequencer/MIDI/digital audio workstation program, very robust, utterly unintuitive. Doesn't have Rosegarden's "output this as well-typeset sheet music" feature though.
Audacity -- audio editing program. I use this for recording my podcasts and for mixing music. By far the best program for dealing with recorded sound.
Zim -- a wiki for your desktop. Very useful for making notes to oneself about connected projects.
GPodder -- lightweight podcast app

It's also useful to install and learn the basics of a command-line text editor -- I'd suggest vim, as that's the most commonly used. If anything goes wrong, it's useful to be able to edit configuration files from a terminal. This is no longer something one has to do on a regular basis, but it's a handy skill for the rare occasions something goes wrong.

All of those *should* be available in Ubuntu's repositories, except for the Apprentice Alf plugin. Glimpse *may* not, as that's relatively new -- it can be found at https://glimpse-editor.github.io/ .

[sorcyress]

Thank you for this comment (I'm in the same boat as Liv). Any recommendations for photo organization?

[theandrewhickey]

I'm afraid not. I'm not really a photo/image person, and so have never looked into that. Sorry.

[ridicully]

They are KDE, not gnome, but for elaborate photo organisation I use Digikam and for the more basic stuff Gwenview.

[lovingboth]

I haven't looked at Digikam for ages, partly because KDE, but I can see it is way better than Shotwell and could easily replace Picasa for me.

I wonder if there's a way to scroll from one month's pictures to another, rather than have to click this month, scroll, click that month, scroll...

[lovingboth]

1. See if you can get the old version of Google's Picasa to run. You might not be able to - I can't on this machine - but it is by far the best photo organiser I've seen.

2. Consider..

.. Shotwell - fairly basic, does nothing but.

.. RawTherapee - also a good editor for adjusting rather than 'draw this line in this colour' photos

.. DarkTable - ditto, but not as up to date on camera / lens correction data

.. Corel AfterShot Pro 3 - commercial, often on offer if you sign up for their mailing list. If you download something else from Corel, you're often given an offer to upgrade the free AfterShot to AfterShot Pro.

Currently, for organisation, I run Picasa in a Windows VM.

[siderea]

LyX

OooooooOOOOOOOOOoooooooh! This sounds very interesting.

[azurelunatic]

I was going to mention Glimpse also.

[sorcyress]

Oh hi, I have also just started Trying To Do A Linux (my mac died last September and I've been living off the work computer which is win10) --I got my new laptop running xubuntu about a month ago, and I have _very_ slowly been Trying To Do Things with it.

So far my only software recs are Quod Libet for music (which feels exactly like the ten years ago itunes I was hoping for) and Rapid Photo Downloader for quickly getting photos off of devices. I have not yet found (or even tried finding) a good photo organizer, and I'm quite daunted by the task since I will have a *lot* of photos to organize very soon.

Anyways, following this post eagerly, because yay other people in the same boat!

[silveradept]

Congratulations on your installation!

One of the best and worst things about Linux is the breadth and depth of software available for any and all purposes you might have. Ubuntu has a lot of well-supported software, so you have lots of choices to pick from.

I would start by getting comfortable with the interface that you can find and install software from. It's been years since I ran Ubuntu, but it's still likely that you have some additional repositories of software that aren't enabled by default. That's probably the first thing to do, so that you have all the possibilities to hand. Then, getting familiar with your package manager will make it easy for you to install software to try it out and then remove it when it doesn't fit your needs.

The first thing I would suggest is determining which of the desktop environments that are available you would like to use. Ubuntu's default, if I recall correctly, is GNOME, which has a particular look and feel to it, which is more akin to macOS than Windows, but there are others. Try a few of them out and see how they arrange things, how customizable they are, how much they make the laptop struggle to do anything, what their default programs are for things.

Once you have one you like, it's probably worth noting what toolkit the desktop environment uses (usually GTK or Qt) and finding applications that use the same toolkit for maximum smoothness and not having to load a completely different kit to work with, which will keep your hard drive and RAM usage smaller. (You can always ignore this in favor of "this program does all the things I want to do in and it does them well and intuitively.")

On Linux, there are many wars fought about what programs are the best. Ignore them all and test programs until you find one you like that has the features you want. Using lists of "bests" found in the Internet is a good way of getting started on candidates, but ultimately what works for you is what is correct.

I generally use VLC as my media catch-all. You may need to install specific video and audio codecs to make all your files work.

Firefox is my main web browser on Linux.

Really, what do you plan on doing in your Linux system? That's going to steer software decisions a lot.

[siderea]

Does it come with man installed? If not, you might want to get that on there for use at the command line.

[cjwatson]

Ubuntu installs man by default, yes (I made sure of that many years ago ...).

[rowan]

I use redshift for making the colour temperature warmer between dusk and dawn. It has fewer options than f.lux.

[damerell]

As a side note, some clever people have figured out how to fool Win 7 installs into thinking they're getting the extended security support. If you don't feel that's unethical, it might extend the life of the backup laptop...

[naath]

Firefox, Thunderbird, and Slack are on my "most used" list; but mostly what I *do* other than web stuff is ssh to other computers and turn them off and on again... so maybe not the most useful.

Libre office broadly copes for opening MS Office things IME, although my E is not of complex documents.

[naath]

If you are up for a ... challenge ...
https://github.com/fangfufu/Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam
does a bad impression of the fake webcam backdrop Zoom for Windows does. (Zoom for Linux exists, but does not do fake backdrop)

[seekingferret]

I prefer the KDE desktop environment over GNOME, which I think is the Ubuntu default.

When I first started using Linux the basic distinction was that GNOME tried to offer you one way to do any task, and have it be the best way they could figure out, whereas KDE offered multiple ways to do anything and you could mess with massive amounts of settings to get the desktop set up how you wanted. That's evolved over the past fifteen years quite a bit. GNOME has more choices now but still a focus on a clean and simple interface, and KDE shifted from endless configuration menus to an interface called Plasma where everything in the desktop is modular and the way you have control of configuration is by choosing which plasma elements you want to use and where and how.


There are other options besides those two, you can try multiple desktop environments to see what you prefer.

[lovingboth]

What is it you actually want to do?

I have been shrinking video files (greater than 1080 pixels is pointless here, and 720 is fine) using Handbrake. It's saved many gigabtyes of disc space.

VSCodium (MS's VSCode IDE minus the spy bits), Sublime, and Atom are all very good text editors.

[lovingboth]

Oh, Parcellite - clipboard manager means you can remember thousands of things that have been on the clipboard.

Drivel, which you need to get from an older Debian repository, works to post here.

[emperor]

The things I use all day every day are:
i) firefox
ii) thunderbird (with occasional forays into emacs mail clients)
iii) emacs (text editor, news client, IRC client, organiser, ...)
iv) workrave (typing break software)
v) vlc (music and video)
vi) pavucontrol (for adjusting audio i/o e.g. when I plug a headset in)

(also fvwm, a window manager, which I think is great having customised to my heart's content years ago, but is considered a bit niche these days)

Enjoy Linux :)

[yalovetz]

I use a lot of things that have already been mentioned: Firefox, LibreOffice, Calibre, Audacity. Personally, I prefer Clementine over Rhythmbox as an audioplayer.

A few other bits and pieces:
Kazam: for screen shots and screen recordings
Scribus: for layout and typesetting for desktop publishing
Shotcut: for video editing
Zotero: for reference management

Plus, like someone else said, I have a few different IDEs, a few different text editors, R, and, in my case, a variety of different command line tools for digital preservation and archiving...