(preface: this is a continuing of this blog...you might wanna check that one first).
INTRO: REACTIONS
Here's a conversation you'll never have:
<insert some random small talk conversation>
You: ...by the way, I moved houses a month ago. I now live in Otherville.
Random person: Otherville, eh? Hmm...have you considered moving to SomeCity?
You: erm...I just moved?
Oooh...and here's another one you'll never hear:
You: check this out: I've got this new tattoo.
Random person: Really...you went with a dragon? You should get one of these tribal-themed wolves instead.
You: erm...thanks for dissing my choice of self-expression?
It would seem obvious to me why not, but for some reason the linux-equivalent is all too common. In fact, I could've seen it coming. I don't know about you, but I don't format my computer every six months (hint: the pre-windows xp days are over). When planning to move over to linux, the "which distribution" was the second main question I had to answer to myself (the first one obviously being "will I find ports or replacements of my software?"). Thanks to pen drives and old laptops, I've tried a pretty wide range of distros over the past couple years: ubuntu (and variants), elementary, mint, deepin, zorin, manjaro, solus, debian, fedora, steamOS...yes, even peppermint. Not always very long, but usually enough to get a good feel on the what and the how. Mint (cinnamon) was one of the first, and had been the staple comparison ever since (only manjaro and solus were real competitors). My main computer, however, is my home in more ways than I like to admit. It needs to be cozy, smooth and tailored to my needs. I'm an ICT technicus, and the last thing I want is to come home and do more work. I've got a girlfriend and a dog that demand my attention and a television that steals my concentration from computer problems. So I want the damn thing to "just work".
Maybe that's just me, but that "tailoring" goes pretty far. I pointed out some of those earlier quirks and will point out some more here (hint: all thumbs up to linux and/or mint). But all in all, I don't want to spend more time on it than I need to to get the thing to listen to ME rather than the other way around (that'll be windows, but I get to that).
Maybe linux users are a different breed. Maybe it's a sense of identity, but really...those conversations from earlier miss their mark on me. Maybe they thought I was exploring possibilities? Maybe they thought they could convince me that grass is greener on the other side? Maybe they own stock in a distribution and want to increase it?
That latter is also something I have to get back to, as it's less a pun than it is satire. The "stock" isn't so much in monetary shares as in numbers. You see, the linux distro's are entangled in a (probably eternal) popularity contest. And since a large majority of linux users are pretty tech-savvy, I can see why you would want to draw someone to YOUR distro.
Nonetheless...thanks, but no thanks. I did my trial and error-ing. Maybe I'll start looking around again in 2023 when the long term support of mint 19 starts expiring, but for now I'm not looking for potential half-forgotten distros.
Like it or not: that's an advantage to windows. The latest version is always the best, and if you're running an old model then there's windows 7 to back it up. That's a pretty hefty difference with linux, where every programmer and their dog seems to have their own distribution. And since they share a rather large underlying codebase (especially the kernel), I wonder how much of that comes down to "how would you like your GUI, sir?".
HIDDEN PRAISES
I bought my first PC in '98 or '99. My best friend bought one a couple months later. Of course it was a faster one (this was a time period where PC's were considered obsolete after less than 2 years), but it had...a multimedia keyboard. "Multimedia" was one of the buzz words of the time, and because I "knew computers" I somehow managed to both dismiss it as irrelevant (it would be as promoting a bike as "a transport medium") as be jealous of my friend's keyboard. This keyboard had extra buttons for surfing the web as well as the basic options for music manipulations. I never bothered with the former (I had a 56k modem, which was only marginally better than the absence of a modem he had ), but quickly found a program that allowed to bind global hotkeys to manipulate music (start/pause, previous track, next track, volume up, volume down). This changed a couple times with later versions of windows and a different music player (I ditched winamp for another one I can't remember now, and then ditched that for AIMP), and had to be done in the settings somehow.
I admit I've liked clementine more than AIMP, but those global shortcuts were nowhere to be found...within the program. As it turns out, mint just has global shortcuts for...well...many things, among which the abovementioned music manipulation. The multimedia keys (if you have them) are bound by default, but you can set up to three per action. So I solved this "issue" in an almost anticlimax way. A much better way as well, because these global hotkeys are maintained centralized instead of per app.
Like android, linux isn't too concerned on the file manager you use. Windows explorer is a harsh necessity for me. I've tried a couple alternatives (total commander and even a few commercial ones), but I never got it really through windows's skull that I want THAT file manager to be the default rather than explorer. Nemo - the default manager in mint - seemingly has far less options than explorer (I'm looking at one such window right now), but upon closer examination you'll see that it's an illusion. More precise: it's like a television remote. Before my girlfriend moved in and demanded cable television, all I used were six buttons: on/off, change source (to swap between consoles), the up and down arrow keys to choose that source, and volume up and volume down. That was literally everything (there was even dust on the rest of the buttons). All the rest of the remote was clutter. In fact: I'm sure a lot of the buttons are STILL clutter on that thing.
Nemo (and I suspect many file managers with it) just put whatever you don't need out of the way, whereas windows' explorer just throws icons and tabs on its interface for the heck of it, while still not having something obvious as a second tab (seriously...copy-pasting is usually done from directory A to directory B...so why does it need 2 windows for it???).
I'm not 100% settled on nemo yet (thunar and dolphin sound interesting as well), but it's certainly not a bad choice.
THE LAUNCHER
I complained about the lack of executor in the other thread, but after not really understanding kupfer or synapse (assuming they even did what I wanted to do in the first place), I finally found what I was looking for in Albert. I'll get to that in a jiffy, but first this: albert is one of those programs that was written for another distro. Because mint is so popular, instructions were made to get it to run. This "sudo apt-get" thing is quickly becoming routine for me...but it failed. The needed package wasn't where it should be according to the website and even a youtube video (yup...there are even youtube video's of people typing in linux commands. how cool is THAT? ).
It took some tinkering, but finally was able to...erm...download a newer version from an older repository that...erm...sorry: I can't really remember (it was almost a week ago now and I was drunk). But albert got installed and ran smoothly. And more importantly: did what I want.
So...what IS IT that I want from it? Well...obviously "launch programs". But more than that, I want to be able to quickly run programs with parameters. As an example: I'm Dutch. I usually know my sh** in English and French, but there are times where that one word eludes me. Or the inverse: when I think I know the word that describes what I want but am not sure (like..."eludes"). For these cases, I got used to just mashing ctrl+w, en elude and enter. Kupfer, synapse, albert and similar all have global shortcuts you can assign (ctrl+w) to open them and put the cursor in the front. They all allow you to write, say "https://translate.google.com/#en/nl/elude" and give the result back in a browser. What I want, however, is to be able to write my own shortcuts in this way. I want to add the equivalent of "en = https://translate.google.com/#en/nl/%s" and pass the argument ('elude') to that %s. It's this part that albert does where the others either fail or where I simply cannot see how it is done.
Albert is in that sense also more focussed. Especially synapse is a swiss army knife of all sorts of features I don't know what they mean, let alone that I might want it. Even in albert, I've turned off everything but the calculator, programs and these "google" searches. I do that not because I want to keep things hidden but because I want to ADD WHAT I WANT rather than have the darn thing catalog everything on my pc and throw me ten possibilities whenever I write anything on the prompt. I'll probably add chromium shortcuts later, but truth be told: I have collected so many of these over the course of 15+ years that half of them don't even work anymore. There too: I just want what's relevant, so I have to keep my gaming "favorite bookmarks" down to at most a dozen or so (down from around 100).
THE NEXT PET PEEVE: SOUND OUTPUT SWITCHING
My next project was pretty difficult on windows. For this, you have to understand first that my television is hooked up directly to my computer as secondary monitor (that mirrors the first). This allows for watching youtube long before smart televisions existed and thanks to HDMI it's all done with a single cable (note: in my previous appartment, I had set it up with a vga cable and some exotic sound cable...this was before HDMI became a de facto standard ).
...but the audio, of course, defaults to my speakers. On windows, I stumbled upon it almost by accident after learning about what nircmd could do. it could solve this self-created problem: automate the switching of audio output to almost a single click (I opted for two because it had some weird result).
I had thought it would be near-impossible to find something similar on mint, but I was wrong. It was almost the opposite, in fact. At first I found one user asking something in the same vein, which yielded me the command "pacmd". With it, I was able to identify the linux-equivalent names of both kinds of speakers (PC speakers and HDMI-speakers...called "audio sinks" in linux), and it was a mere command that allowed to switch between these. The only problem I'm currently running into now is: programs are hellbent to keep the current setup, even with the default audio output elsewhere.
Again, I assumed wrong that this would be a shot in the dark and that google wouldn't know the answer. Instead, I almost immediately found the opposite: a thread with this discussion, with three or four programmers exchanging possible codes and improvements on that code ("this should be able to change the audio output on the fly", "here's some optimization on that code", "here's a solution that would toggle between the different streams with one button-click", "interesting...here's THAT program in half the amount of lines"). While I haven't really tried any of these solutions, the mere existence is pretty weird. I mean...Think about it: compared to windows, linux has a share of what...a couple percent of total PC users? Split that between the different kind of distro's, and you'd think there'd be hardly a user left, let alone someone who would know this sort of stuff. And nonetheless...this sort of thing is a thing.
CONCLUSION
It's been hardly two weeks since I went all linux. I've worked out the major quirks, tried some games (GoG lets you download .sh files,which are apparently the same thing as .deb, except that you have to set them to execute manually at first), and I'm dibbling into lutris now.
EDIT: I was somewhat wrong on .sh files (see comments), and I don't want to give the wrong impression to people. These are shell scripts, meaning that once given proper access, can basically do anything on your computer (I take it that .deb files are more restricted in what they can do).
This morning, I was afk during the boot of my pc and it auto-booted into windows. Even the act of clicking seemed to have a delay on it (note: both OS'es are installed on SSD). Upon attempting to restart, it told me to wait some minutes because it was "getting windows ready"(another plus for linux: transparent and non-invasive updates, up to the point where you can upgrade the entire kernel without restarting).
EDIT2: about that updating: here's another antic from a windows 7 computer at work. It downloaded and attempted to install a 60mb .net update for about 5 minutes and then failed with a cryptic error message (80243004). After doing this a couple time (each time taking five minutes, meaning it either was downloading from the slowest server from Hawaii or it was just goofing off for no reason), I looked up the error message. Turns out that I had to uncheck the setting that would hide icons in the taskbar. That did the trick, but honestly: WHY ON EARTH IS THE CAPABILITY OF INSTALLING A .NET UPDATE DEPENDENT ON A FREAKING GUI SETTING??? And why does it need to restart after intalling it?
So...I now set grub to auto-boot to "the last booted entry". I'm almost curious to see how long it'll take before it'll be windows again.
INTRO: REACTIONS
Here's a conversation you'll never have:
<insert some random small talk conversation>
You: ...by the way, I moved houses a month ago. I now live in Otherville.
Random person: Otherville, eh? Hmm...have you considered moving to SomeCity?
You: erm...I just moved?
Oooh...and here's another one you'll never hear:
You: check this out: I've got this new tattoo.
Random person: Really...you went with a dragon? You should get one of these tribal-themed wolves instead.
You: erm...thanks for dissing my choice of self-expression?
It would seem obvious to me why not, but for some reason the linux-equivalent is all too common. In fact, I could've seen it coming. I don't know about you, but I don't format my computer every six months (hint: the pre-windows xp days are over). When planning to move over to linux, the "which distribution" was the second main question I had to answer to myself (the first one obviously being "will I find ports or replacements of my software?"). Thanks to pen drives and old laptops, I've tried a pretty wide range of distros over the past couple years: ubuntu (and variants), elementary, mint, deepin, zorin, manjaro, solus, debian, fedora, steamOS...yes, even peppermint. Not always very long, but usually enough to get a good feel on the what and the how. Mint (cinnamon) was one of the first, and had been the staple comparison ever since (only manjaro and solus were real competitors). My main computer, however, is my home in more ways than I like to admit. It needs to be cozy, smooth and tailored to my needs. I'm an ICT technicus, and the last thing I want is to come home and do more work. I've got a girlfriend and a dog that demand my attention and a television that steals my concentration from computer problems. So I want the damn thing to "just work".
Maybe that's just me, but that "tailoring" goes pretty far. I pointed out some of those earlier quirks and will point out some more here (hint: all thumbs up to linux and/or mint). But all in all, I don't want to spend more time on it than I need to to get the thing to listen to ME rather than the other way around (that'll be windows, but I get to that).
Maybe linux users are a different breed. Maybe it's a sense of identity, but really...those conversations from earlier miss their mark on me. Maybe they thought I was exploring possibilities? Maybe they thought they could convince me that grass is greener on the other side? Maybe they own stock in a distribution and want to increase it?
That latter is also something I have to get back to, as it's less a pun than it is satire. The "stock" isn't so much in monetary shares as in numbers. You see, the linux distro's are entangled in a (probably eternal) popularity contest. And since a large majority of linux users are pretty tech-savvy, I can see why you would want to draw someone to YOUR distro.
Nonetheless...thanks, but no thanks. I did my trial and error-ing. Maybe I'll start looking around again in 2023 when the long term support of mint 19 starts expiring, but for now I'm not looking for potential half-forgotten distros.
Like it or not: that's an advantage to windows. The latest version is always the best, and if you're running an old model then there's windows 7 to back it up. That's a pretty hefty difference with linux, where every programmer and their dog seems to have their own distribution. And since they share a rather large underlying codebase (especially the kernel), I wonder how much of that comes down to "how would you like your GUI, sir?".
HIDDEN PRAISES
I bought my first PC in '98 or '99. My best friend bought one a couple months later. Of course it was a faster one (this was a time period where PC's were considered obsolete after less than 2 years), but it had...a multimedia keyboard. "Multimedia" was one of the buzz words of the time, and because I "knew computers" I somehow managed to both dismiss it as irrelevant (it would be as promoting a bike as "a transport medium") as be jealous of my friend's keyboard. This keyboard had extra buttons for surfing the web as well as the basic options for music manipulations. I never bothered with the former (I had a 56k modem, which was only marginally better than the absence of a modem he had
), but quickly found a program that allowed to bind global hotkeys to manipulate music (start/pause, previous track, next track, volume up, volume down). This changed a couple times with later versions of windows and a different music player (I ditched winamp for another one I can't remember now, and then ditched that for AIMP), and had to be done in the settings somehow.I admit I've liked clementine more than AIMP, but those global shortcuts were nowhere to be found...within the program. As it turns out, mint just has global shortcuts for...well...many things, among which the abovementioned music manipulation. The multimedia keys (if you have them) are bound by default, but you can set up to three per action. So I solved this "issue" in an almost anticlimax way. A much better way as well, because these global hotkeys are maintained centralized instead of per app.
Like android, linux isn't too concerned on the file manager you use. Windows explorer is a harsh necessity for me. I've tried a couple alternatives (total commander and even a few commercial ones), but I never got it really through windows's skull that I want THAT file manager to be the default rather than explorer. Nemo - the default manager in mint - seemingly has far less options than explorer (I'm looking at one such window right now), but upon closer examination you'll see that it's an illusion. More precise: it's like a television remote. Before my girlfriend moved in and demanded cable television, all I used were six buttons: on/off, change source (to swap between consoles), the up and down arrow keys to choose that source, and volume up and volume down. That was literally everything (there was even dust on the rest of the buttons). All the rest of the remote was clutter. In fact: I'm sure a lot of the buttons are STILL clutter on that thing.
Nemo (and I suspect many file managers with it) just put whatever you don't need out of the way, whereas windows' explorer just throws icons and tabs on its interface for the heck of it, while still not having something obvious as a second tab (seriously...copy-pasting is usually done from directory A to directory B...so why does it need 2 windows for it???).
I'm not 100% settled on nemo yet (thunar and dolphin sound interesting as well), but it's certainly not a bad choice.
THE LAUNCHER
I complained about the lack of executor in the other thread, but after not really understanding kupfer or synapse (assuming they even did what I wanted to do in the first place), I finally found what I was looking for in Albert. I'll get to that in a jiffy, but first this: albert is one of those programs that was written for another distro. Because mint is so popular, instructions were made to get it to run. This "sudo apt-get" thing is quickly becoming routine for me...but it failed. The needed package wasn't where it should be according to the website and even a youtube video (yup...there are even youtube video's of people typing in linux commands. how cool is THAT?
).It took some tinkering, but finally was able to...erm...download a newer version from an older repository that...erm...sorry: I can't really remember (it was almost a week ago now and I was drunk). But albert got installed and ran smoothly. And more importantly: did what I want.
So...what IS IT that I want from it? Well...obviously "launch programs". But more than that, I want to be able to quickly run programs with parameters. As an example: I'm Dutch. I usually know my sh** in English and French, but there are times where that one word eludes me. Or the inverse: when I think I know the word that describes what I want but am not sure (like..."eludes"). For these cases, I got used to just mashing ctrl+w, en elude and enter. Kupfer, synapse, albert and similar all have global shortcuts you can assign (ctrl+w) to open them and put the cursor in the front. They all allow you to write, say "https://translate.google.com/#en/nl/elude" and give the result back in a browser. What I want, however, is to be able to write my own shortcuts in this way. I want to add the equivalent of "en = https://translate.google.com/#en/nl/%s" and pass the argument ('elude') to that %s. It's this part that albert does where the others either fail or where I simply cannot see how it is done.
Albert is in that sense also more focussed. Especially synapse is a swiss army knife of all sorts of features I don't know what they mean, let alone that I might want it. Even in albert, I've turned off everything but the calculator, programs and these "google" searches. I do that not because I want to keep things hidden but because I want to ADD WHAT I WANT rather than have the darn thing catalog everything on my pc and throw me ten possibilities whenever I write anything on the prompt. I'll probably add chromium shortcuts later, but truth be told: I have collected so many of these over the course of 15+ years that half of them don't even work anymore. There too: I just want what's relevant, so I have to keep my gaming "favorite bookmarks" down to at most a dozen or so (down from around 100).
THE NEXT PET PEEVE: SOUND OUTPUT SWITCHING
My next project was pretty difficult on windows. For this, you have to understand first that my television is hooked up directly to my computer as secondary monitor (that mirrors the first). This allows for watching youtube long before smart televisions existed and thanks to HDMI it's all done with a single cable (note: in my previous appartment, I had set it up with a vga cable and some exotic sound cable...this was before HDMI became a de facto standard
)....but the audio, of course, defaults to my speakers. On windows, I stumbled upon it almost by accident after learning about what nircmd could do. it could solve this self-created problem: automate the switching of audio output to almost a single click (I opted for two because it had some weird result).
I had thought it would be near-impossible to find something similar on mint, but I was wrong. It was almost the opposite, in fact. At first I found one user asking something in the same vein, which yielded me the command "pacmd". With it, I was able to identify the linux-equivalent names of both kinds of speakers (PC speakers and HDMI-speakers...called "audio sinks" in linux), and it was a mere command that allowed to switch between these. The only problem I'm currently running into now is: programs are hellbent to keep the current setup, even with the default audio output elsewhere.
Again, I assumed wrong that this would be a shot in the dark and that google wouldn't know the answer. Instead, I almost immediately found the opposite: a thread with this discussion, with three or four programmers exchanging possible codes and improvements on that code ("this should be able to change the audio output on the fly", "here's some optimization on that code", "here's a solution that would toggle between the different streams with one button-click", "interesting...here's THAT program in half the amount of lines"). While I haven't really tried any of these solutions, the mere existence is pretty weird. I mean...Think about it: compared to windows, linux has a share of what...a couple percent of total PC users? Split that between the different kind of distro's, and you'd think there'd be hardly a user left, let alone someone who would know this sort of stuff. And nonetheless...this sort of thing is a thing.
CONCLUSION
It's been hardly two weeks since I went all linux. I've worked out the major quirks, tried some games (GoG lets you download .sh files,
EDIT: I was somewhat wrong on .sh files (see comments), and I don't want to give the wrong impression to people. These are shell scripts, meaning that once given proper access, can basically do anything on your computer (I take it that .deb files are more restricted in what they can do).
This morning, I was afk during the boot of my pc and it auto-booted into windows. Even the act of clicking seemed to have a delay on it (note: both OS'es are installed on SSD). Upon attempting to restart, it told me to wait some minutes because it was "getting windows ready"(another plus for linux: transparent and non-invasive updates, up to the point where you can upgrade the entire kernel without restarting).
EDIT2: about that updating: here's another antic from a windows 7 computer at work. It downloaded and attempted to install a 60mb .net update for about 5 minutes and then failed with a cryptic error message (80243004). After doing this a couple time (each time taking five minutes, meaning it either was downloading from the slowest server from Hawaii or it was just goofing off for no reason), I looked up the error message. Turns out that I had to uncheck the setting that would hide icons in the taskbar. That did the trick, but honestly: WHY ON EARTH IS THE CAPABILITY OF INSTALLING A .NET UPDATE DEPENDENT ON A FREAKING GUI SETTING??? And why does it need to restart after intalling it?
So...I now set grub to auto-boot to "the last booted entry". I'm almost curious to see how long it'll take before it'll be windows again.
