The non-operating system operating system
June 25th, 2010
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I touched briefly upon OS independence when I wrote a little bit about the Q10 minimalistic word processor a few weeks ago and PyRoom, another minimalistic word processor, last week. Or, if I didn’t, then I certainly should have done. The point that I’m trying to make is that as both of those applications save their data as straight unmodified text files; those file are obviously readable on pretty much any system out there, from computers to word processors, tablet devices to mobile phones – hell, I think that even my Microwave displays text files. |
Perhaps I exaggerate slightly?
I was wondering about this the other day as I am desperately trying to simplify my systems, partly in order to make them easier to use and partly to make them more fault tolerant.
I currently run Linux Mint 8.0 (Gloria) on my main machine and was pondering whether to upgrade to Mint 9.0, change to OpenSolaris (I like the idea of ZFS) or revert to core Debian.
I was also wondering if I should bite the bullet and take a look at BSD.
I looked at the applications that I use on a daily basis and was shocked to find that my current can’t live withouts are as follows…..
Gedit (with add ons) – for taking notes and web development. I tend to do an awful lot in Gedit. A lot of my WordPress posts are written in gedit and then cut and pasted into WordPress (I like the control using HTML gives me and, also, I have a very slow internet connection!)
Nautilus (with scripts) – for file management, resizing images, sftp and renaming files. When tabs came to Nautilus it was like and angel had come down to earth and personally re-filled my beer fridge!
Thunderbird – mail
Chrome – internet access
Rhythmbox – music
GIMP – for graphics manipulation
And… well, that’s about it! I do use Open Office but, to be honest, would be just as happy with Gnumeric and Abiword.
Even Google docs (or similar) would be good enough for my limited office application requirements.
I also use Pyroom but that will run on pretty much anything.
In other words, I was using Gnome (and its default applications) sat upon a Debian based operating system.
To be blunt about it, Gnome is my Operating System; it just happens to require a real OS to sit upon.
I like the austere feel to Gnome; On my system I don’t have any icons on the desktop other than pointers to external shares and drives.
Everything on my system (and I mean everything) is launched off the panel.
If I don’t use it, it doesn’t get added to the panel – if it’s not on the panel, it doesn’t get used!
I’ve left the menu in place but, to be honest, I use it so little, I forget where to find things in it!
Which kind of brings me to my point…
I’m running a web design/support business, I maintain some successful blogs and I write.
I’m not particularly bothered what Operating System I use (as long as it’s fast, easy to manage and secure) but… don’t take Gnome away from me – I can’t live without Gedit and Nautilus!
Having learnt to just about cope with the complexities of GIMP and Rhythmbox (I kid you not!), I wouldn’t want to have to change to alternatives; having developed my working style around Gedit and Nautilus, I COULDN’T change those.
But, why should I?
I can get Gnome on top of Solaris, Open Solaris, BSD, Debian based Linux, Red Hat based Linux, Suse Linux, Slackware Linux… in fact pretty much every type of operating system that I’d want to use!
I can’t run Gnome on top a Windows machine or on a Mac (unless install an alternative OS), so… I guess I’m never be a convert to either of those systems.
What I don’t think I’ll be so much of in the future is… A Debian/Mint fanatic.
Don’t get me wrong….
For a desktop operating system, I personally believe that Linux Mint is the best blend of functionality, eye candy, performance and security.
For a server, I can’t envisage using anything other than plain vanilla Debian.
But, in the real world, I could cope on any system that supported Gnome.
When someone next asks me what operating system I use, I’ll truthfully tell them…
I use Gnome on top of Linux Mint (or whatever!)
You can keep your OS wars, just don’t take away my gnome!But what I’ve found it that… Given a stable underlying operating system, what matters to me (and a lots of users, I suspect), is the functionality of a small handful of desktop applications. We learn how to live with those; they become part of our working structure and…. We don’t like to change! And why should we? And now for a totally gratuitous picture of a garden gnome! Or, a pair of them…. A pair that, I do have to say, looks remarkably like…. The girlfriend and me!. |
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All the best
June 26th, 2010 at 10:04 am
I find that kate is an excellent text editor which has many syntax highlighting options. Well worth a try.
Andy
June 26th, 2010 at 10:50 am
Hi Andrew.
Yes I used Kate back when I was using Suse Linux.
Trouble is I have got so used to Gedit that it’s taken over many duties one wouldn’t normally assign to a text editor. Not sure I could change. I did try Geany and found that it is very full featured – I just preferred what I am used to.
I suppose my main thoughts are that, for me, my OS is Gedit, Chrome, Nautilus and Thunderbird sat upon a Debian flavoured Linux. I now realise that it doesn’t really matter too much about the underlying OS, it’s Gnome that matters to me. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to end up using Open Solaris (for the ZFS) but, I’ll still be using Gnome so there won’t be any major learning to do.
All the best
Keith
June 26th, 2010 at 11:54 am
Try Medit it is great for coding as well as casual text editing. I have been using it for the last year and has completely replaced gedit for my needs.
June 26th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Hi – I think I’ve come across Medit (perhaps in Puppy Linux?)
I’ll take another look at it but, to be honest, I’m really happy with Gedit (with add-ons.)
I now realise that all that time I spent being a Debian evangalist, then an Ubuntu evangalist, then a Suse evangalist etc. etc. doesn’t really matter because, for me, the only things that have really ever mattered are the few applications that I use all the time. For me, those are the simple Gnome applications. Thus, for me, the OS doesn’t really matter – for me, Gnome is the operating system and what lies underneath just has to work, be stable, secure and fast.
I’m currently using Mint. I my stick with that but, more likely will go back to a very simple Debian base or, becasue I want to use ZFS (my data and my client’s data have started to become very important to me), I may end up going to Solaris or Open Solaris.
All the best
Keith
P.S. I will make a point of taking a look at Medit – thanks for suggesting it.
June 26th, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Yes, you are right. Who cares about operating system when he has to do some couple of things on 4-5 applications daily!
June 26th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Ravi – exactly!
What surprised me is how few applications I actually use, bearing in mind I use my PC to earn my living and spend about 50 hours a week in front of it!
And, those applications tend to be the ones that come as standard with the Gnome desktop. Thus Gnome is my OS?
By keeping things simple, I’ve got to be helping my chances should I ever have to think about disaster recovery or (more importantly) business continuity.
All the best (and thanks for commenting)
Keith
June 26th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
vim ftw
June 26th, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Yup – that does away with the desktop altogether – I have no problems with that. And there are console options for pretty much everything.
June 26th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
FWIW most of those apps (even nautilus) do work quite nicely on top of MacOS.
I use vim, mostly through MacVim (a nice port that enjoys better integration with MacOS events than out-of-the-box vim) but also in Terminal.app, but gedit would work as well.
Chrome is (for now) my web browser of choice (though it’s nice to be able to test websites with my own Firefox and Safari).
I almost never use the Finder nor any Filemanager on the boxes I use (I’m too much terminal oriented I guess), but hey, you want nautilus “port install nautilus” and you have it!
I use SongBird for music, I don’t think they ported Rhythmbox… that would be your only problem.
Just to say that you might be even more OS-free than you thought…
Not even speaking about Cygwin and such on top of Windows…
June 26th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
Soli – Thanks for this. The reason I like nautilus (with scripts) is that I can resize and rename photos very easily from an interface that I’m used to without using another application. Didn’t realise that you could do so much with OSX – I’ve got a copy running under VMware Player (naughty, I know) but I only use it to test websites (and, I guess, to play around with.)
I used to use Songbird but didn’t reinstall it after an upgrade to Mint. I was quite happy with Songbird.
Not sure that I’d want to use Windows as an underlying OS, even with Cygin – I’m happier with apt-get and the whole Debian thing. Guess I may have to learn Solaris though….
All the best
Keith (desperately trying to keep cool on what is the hottest day of the year so far, in France!)
P.S. Once again, many thanks for you considered comments.
June 26th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
I must admit that OSX is especially nice when used with AppleScripts, applications like QuickSilver and so on… and many on OSX use Finder replacements like PathFinder to get the little “plus” that’s missing from the default file explorer.
For the Cygwin part, that was kind of a joke, I think it would be awful in the long run.
Sylvain (enjoying French hotness too
)
P.S. Your ‘about’ page might deserve… well… something !
June 26th, 2010 at 7:10 pm
^hotness^heat
sorry
June 26th, 2010 at 7:41 pm
Whoops Soli – no about page! I knew I’d forgotten something!
If you’re desperate, nick the one off http://www.atasteofgarlic.com
I was kind of hoping the CYgwin stuff wasn’t too real but.. you can never tell – lots of weird people about!
All the best
Keith
P.S. Had to stop working in the garden after 2 hours – sooooooooooooooo hot!
P.P.S. Have been sitting in the orchard with a nice glass of wine to cool down!
June 26th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
My application stack is different, but for the most part what you say is true. I run Fluxbox, I use thunar, I keep a drop down terminal via tilda, Firefox, Chrome, a few dock apps. I can pretty much run on any Linux/BSD I want.
However this is a big difference between distros. Move to slackware and see how much you have to configure. CPU architecture issues you have to decide up front working with Gentoo. How does media automount? dbus rules? etc, etc, etc. All of that stuff and the defaults related to it (or if it is even installed) is up to the distro maintainer.
While the difference between Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora may seem very small, the difference between Ubuntu(Gnome)/Sidux(Whatever you wnat)/Mepis(KDE)/Slackware(KDE) is much bigger.
June 26th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
The best of gnome is its simplicity and stability. Every apps packed in ubuntu are so easy to use. I’m talking about gedit, rythmbox, firefox, nautilus, etc. And it just *works*,right after the installation or on the live CD.
On windows i can’t get the same working without installing a bunch of software that make my system unstable, full of virus, with publicity on my screen or just *crashing* everytime.
I have a home recording studio and i can records songs with the ubuntu studio live CD. Everything is just *working* and this is the most important to me.
Gnome FTW.
June 27th, 2010 at 12:12 am
Chrome (as you use it here) is not for Internet access. It’s for Web access.
Repeat after me: The Web is not the Internet.
June 27th, 2010 at 8:27 am
I’ve started to use Gnome on Debian ~6 years ago and i’ve tried KDE, XFCE, E16, E17, LXDE, fluxbox, etc.. etc.. but every time i returned to Gnome.. never had a main OS without Gnome.
after 10.04 upgrade i tried xubuntu-desktop and when i needed to use file manager i just press alt+f2 and wrote “nautilus”, i have never tried that mice thing (text editor in xubuntu, can’t remember its name) nor thunar (except for double clicking).
I used Debian, *buntu, Mint, OpenSuse, Fedora but every time (except for the times which i didn’t know there is something called Ubuntu) i returned to Ubuntu and my lovely Gnome.
and my programs which i can’t live without:
-Gedit
-Nautilus
-Aptitude (thats why i have to stay on top of a Debian based Distro)
-Chromium-Browser, Firefox
-Guake
-Rhythmbox
-Filezilla
-Emesene
-Shotwell
-Transmission
-VLC
June 27th, 2010 at 8:40 am
Ekram – Snap. Had forgotten about Quake and didn’t know about Alt + F2 – So I’ve learned something today. Many thanks.
All the best
Keith
June 27th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Keith, I use vim and sometimes Gedit. If you don’t mind, could you tell us your favourite plugin for Gedit. Thanks.
June 27th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Great article – it seriously made me think about what others need and want from an OS. In particular, I enjoyed reading the comments.
Like others here, I run through many of the various Linux distros over the years. In my case:
- Red hat v5.8 (1998!) – fun, but not productive
- Mandrake 2001 (when Linux became my primary OS)
- Kubuntu 2005
- PCLinuxOS 2006
- Kubuntu 2007 to last week
- Ubuntu 2008 (for six months, to seriously use Gnome, went back to KDE)
- as of now, Linux Mint (finally, have gone off KDE – don’t need the eye candy, too unstable, getting too bloated, etc)
Must need apps:
o gedit (just switched, from kate – faster, simpler)
o gFTP (long favourite app)
o nautilus (switched from dolphin – faster, with numerous pluses and minuses but overall very positive)
o bluefish (switched from quanta – still evaluating, but first impressions very favourable)
o thunderbird (long use – no compelling reason to change)
o totem movie player (just discovered it after years of tolerating KDE offerings. Great! All I want to do is select a bunch of music files and click ‘play’…)
o gqview (now geeqie) basic picture viewer. Latest version *much* faster
o openoffice.org – for work files, my employer being an MS shop
o sadly, MS Access – a legacy database that I’m stuck with supporting and running. That’s the only reason I maintain a Windows partition on my PC.
I’m still exploring Mint, adapting it to me and me to Mint. And having a ball, to boot
)
June 27th, 2010 at 9:29 pm
Likewise, though my app chouces are a little different and include some extras like Inkscape, Dia, Ardur and Blender. I do need to be more careful about the underlying OS. I have tried Ubuntu Studio, but I find AVLinux works better for me.
BTW, for my day job, I am forced to use Windows. However, I am allowed to install Cygwin as part of my tool kit. It makes some of my tasks a lot easier to accomplish.
June 29th, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Interesting thoughts. I’m not sure what to think about the idea that “GNOME is an operating system”…
Most definitions of “operating system” revolve around hardware, and GNOME is quite remote from the hardware control layers of a kernel.
But in a way it does manage resources… It would be a bit of a stretch IMHO, but you could call the application resource management done by GNOME a sort of operating system.
And even though it’s typically not used this way, it could be seen as a distributed operating system layer, providing messaging between not only applications on a single host, but also between networked heterogeneous operating environments.
Of course, GNOME is often used as a desktop manager — like KDE, or a superset of what window managers like Motif or twm provide. It provides a consistent desktop and windowing environment in which to use applications.
But I wonder if the facet of GNOME that’s really important to you is none of the above, but simply the libraries it provides as building blocks for application developers?
In any case there are certainly many facets to GNOME, so thanks for philosophizing & provoking some thought on “what IS GNOME?”
June 29th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
Hi Johann
Yes, perhaps I was trying to be a bit provocative but it all ties in with a change in my thinking. I think that I’m now starting to think in terms of functionality layers.
I’ll try to explain; I know I need an operating system and although I’m now almost certainly going to end up with OpenSolaris, the actual operating system doesn’t matter so much as long as it is….
Clean – in the way that I find Linux clean – separate config files in a logical directory structure
Stable – I find most Debian Linuxes to be very stable – I’m sure the others are as well
Fast – I’ve got better things to spend my money on than processor and memory upgrades and finally,
Easy to support – in other words, security upgrades that I don’t have to worry about
Once the underlying OS is there and controlling the hardware layers, what I’m more interested in is the application layer. Or, to use your phrase, the application resource layer. For me this has to be Gnome as it is the one that works best for me.
I can try to simplify my application layer by doing as much as possible in plain text or html. I can try to avoid proprietary file formats. I believe in fault tolerant IT in the same way that we believe our cars and our airplanes should be fault tolerant. There is no excuse these day for not being about to work on validated data because of hardware or software failure.
I suppose that overall, the main point that I was trying to make is that I stopped being a “my flavour of Linux/OS is better than your flavour of OS evangelist (and perhaps a bore?)” and now say I don’t really care what sort of OS it is as long as it fulfills the four requirements that I’ve detailed above and runs Gnome.
Yes, the post was designed to provoke some feedback and, I have to say that all the feedback has had value. I have learned from it and maybe, just maybe, some people have taken a look at their crowded machines and thought… “perhaps I can simplify things” and, by doing so, are going to make their systems more fault tolerant?
I hate to say this but, sometimes I envy those guys who can do everything but everything in Emacs – they don’t have to worry about this stuff at all!
All the best
Keith
July 2nd, 2010 at 6:01 am
[...] Last week I spoke briefly about how, for me, Gnome is my effective operating system. [...]
July 3rd, 2010 at 5:56 am
I keep telling people that distro choice is not the main decision you have to make when switching to Linux, its the desktop.
The differences between distros using the same desktop are so minimal that when I give a few Live CDs for friends to try, very often they tell me that its the same thing (whent its two different distros).
We still give people the choice at LUGfests but its running about 80-20% KDE vs GNOME and the more GNOME looks like Mac (cmon, the last Ubuntu is spooky how close it has become to the Mac desktop), the more I think ex-Windows users will get put off.
People like what they know and simple paradigms like top or bottom panel still freaks out people (youd be stunned to know how many XP users never knew you could just drag and move the panel to any of the four sides),
I dont have to tell you that the Office ribbon was badly received in many work environments.
People like familiarity.
I could care less, love my E17 and hate every single default theme, font size, icons and wallpapers on most distros.
The great thing is that free software desktops allow me the choice of having the desktop look like I WANT IT to look, not how someone else thinks I should like.
Some UI dweebs can wax all they like about line and flow and minimalist this and that but I got bad eyesight…i dont need elegant 8pt font, I need big. Big font, big icons, big border and buttons. FLOSS desktops allow me to find one best suited to my needs and tastes.
Thats what I look in my desktop.
Well, that and no mono dependencies.
Todd
December 29th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
[...] mentioned in previous posts (The non-operating system operating system and My Personal Gnome) that I’m not too worried about the underlying operating system [...]