Episode: 3581
Title: HPR3581: My daily Linux driver.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3581/hpr3581.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:44:01

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3581 from Monday the 25th of April 2022.
Today's show is entitled My Daily Linux Driver.
It is the 30th show of nightwise and is about 23 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Linux Workstation, Ubuntu Budgie Mint.
Hey there, Hacker Public Radio.
This is Nightwise from the Nightwise.com podcast calling.
And I was due a show.
Hey guys and girls, I wanted to give you a little bit of an update on how I worked.
And what I do.
I'm an IT consultant and for the last two years actually I have been mostly working from home
as a subcontractor for a larger client.
And aside from that, I have my own clients that I need to service.
So I spent quite a bit of time behind the computer.
And aside from that, I also want to maintain my hobbies which are like podcasting and stuff.
So I want to be creative as well.
And this makes for an incredible amount of time spent behind the computer.
And I have over the last couple of years rolled into this blurb, this routine where in the morning you get up
and you go sit behind the screen and you work behind the screen.
And in the evenings you relax behind the screen and then you go to bed and you dream of the screen.
And I started to notice that my work and life and hobbies were all melting together because they were all behind the screen.
And I was starting to think that this wasn't really healthy.
And that I needed to find a way to segment these parts of my day and these parts of my life.
So I can have focus because somewhere it all melts together in this big multi-tasking pot of stuff that you need to do for several projects.
And before you know it's work and life and home and everything in between is kind of meddling, melding, flowing together and making this well potable.
Yeah, where it seems that somehow you're never done, you're never quite focused on work or you're never quite able to relax because the two constantly get in the way.
So I decided to give myself a little bit of a chance to reorganize stuff and starting with my workplace.
My main workplace is a standing desk that I bought at YiskJYSK which is, I don't know, a low-end version of IKEA.
And the actual table that I bought, the actual desk that I bought was about half of the price that you buy a standing desk at IKEA.
And I was a little worried about it in the beginning. I went like, is this going to be as good as the one from IKEA because I have one from IKEA for my studio.
And I decided, you know, I'll go for it and we'll see where it goes.
And to be perfectly honest, it was fine. It was actually quite good.
The quality is pretty good and that is my main desk. Now on that main desk, I have a 34 inch Republic of Gamers Ultramide monitor from ASUS which is my main display.
It's slightly curved, it's big and it allows me to have three main areas of focus because it's so wide.
I have the central window I work on which requires my focus and then I have two side areas on that screen where I have, well, things that are on the back burner that need to be monitored or that have some kind of other function.
Now recently I've added another 27 inch Dell display to that in portrait mode on the side which I use exclusively as a monitor for my command line windows.
So I can keep track of my music and all of my command line apps because I do quite a lot in the command line a little bit more about that later on.
The keyboard that I have hooked up is the Logitech MX keys which is a three channel Bluetooth keyboard with a number pad and these Logitech MX keyboards are pretty expensive but I have to say they last and last and last.
I have made a solemn vow, not a solemn vow, that's something else. A solemn vow to only buy keyboards from Logitech because of the quality of the build and everything.
It's a chocolate keyboard with quite a bit of travel but what's most important is that it's quiet, it's really quiet and that's something that I really like about it.
Then I have the MX Master 3 mouse which is very ergonomic, also quite expensive but again it lasts and lasts and both the mouse and the keyboard can be charged via a USB-C connector which is really handy then I don't need batteries and stuff like that.
So that's basically my main interface, these are the two screens I work on, this is the human interface devices that I use and for the headset part of it I use a wireless headset with a boom mic and it's the Jabra 370 which is a wireless headset and microphone which is ideal for video quality.
The battery life is fairly good, it lasts me more than a day and it's really handy to have around what I really like about that thing is the range.
The fact that I can have my headphones on, I can be in a conference call and I can literally walk downstairs to the coffee machine and stay in the call.
That is really, really important to me because aside from being able to sit and stand during the day with my standing desk I try to spend half of the day standing, I start up in the morning with in standing mode and in the afternoon I go sit down.
I wanted to have mobility and I have noticed that not being tied to the desk with a cable is really convenient for me because then I can also walk around and stuff like that.
When it comes to a webcam I have a Logitech C920 webcam that I've owned for quite a while now and as with most Logitech products I'm pretty satisfied with this thing.
Quality is really good even in low light and it does what it does and that's just great.
Now I know what you're saying, hey, how about the computer? Well, yeah, the computer. I have a couple of desktops lying around and currently I have connected a desktop to that setup.
I have played around in the last couple of months with multiple setups using laptops and docs and stuff like that but I decided to go with a desktop because I can literally walk away from it.
Instead of having a laptop that I dock everywhere and then I take the laptop with me and basically everything that's on the laptop comes with you.
So all the work stress kind of comes with you and the environment that you work in comes with you and that can be convenient if you're a mobile worker but that can be very, I don't know, detrimental to your ability to relax when you use the same machine to relax on because work and play are not really separated anymore, at least not in your mind.
So I went for a desktop and the desktop that I'm currently using is a Lenovo M710. It has 16 gigs of RAM. It's an i5 processor to small desktop with a couple of ports. I'm pretty satisfied with it and it's speedy enough because what I run on it on the 265 gig SSD drive is Linux Mint.
And I decided to go for Linux as my main work environment because I'm cross-platform slider so I'm on windows, I'm on the Mac, I'm on iOS, I'm on Linux.
Kind of what tickles my fancy but I wanted to have a operating system that was really convenient and I had two options.
When taking a look at what I want to do and how I want to work, the Mac and the Linux machines stood out because of their Unix undergrounds or in the case of the Mac, they're open BSD underground.
Having the ability to have command line applications running and I don't know having that flexibility really worked for me and I have started to experiment with using windows for a while, using the Mac for a while, using Linux for a while.
And when I think back at what is the most convenient to work with, I got to say my Mac because the integration of my iPhone, my tablet, the Mac, the Linux or Linuxy underground, that is actually the ultimate machine to work on for me.
Because I started to notice this that I could use my iPad as an extra display, I could get my phone calls on the same headset that I'm using to work behind my computer.
It integrated the entire ecosphere but I decided not to use my Mac which is a M1 MacBook Air because I wanted to save that for the creative things that I do.
I do a lot of creativity on my Mac, video editing, audio editing, stuff like that so I didn't want to have that machine associated with the daily grind.
So I went for Linux. Linux Mint to me is I tried a couple of distros, I tried regular Ubuntu, I tried Budgie, I tried Mate and I found out that the latest version of Linux Mint with the Cinnamon Desktop does have its advantages in the fact that it's stable, it's mature and it's faster.
It's faster than Budgie and faster than regular GNOME 3, I thought that this was the best balance of an operating system that kind of got out of the way and let me do my work.
Now since I'm a freelance consultant, I always work on the client's systems and in this case I only need Office 365.
I only need Teams, SharePoints, Outlook stuff like that, everything that runs in a browser.
So for me, the choice of a browser was pretty important. I want to have my browser as my digital window to the client's workplace and I've set up a lot of bookmarks and stuff and I wanted to sync them over.
I also thought about privacy. One of the options that was pretty easy was to just go with Google Chrome but I wanted to have some privacy, something where I would say maybe not.
Maybe let's not go for Chrome, let's go for the next best thing and that would be Edge. It's perfect to integrate into a Office 365 system because the apps and the browser kind of like each other.
So I set up an Outlook account. I synced all of my bookmarks to that. I set up a second Outlook account and I synced all of my bookmarks of the main client that I use for that.
And I basically use Microsoft Edge with two profiles, one for my own company, with all of my links and all of my account identities and one for the clients that I currently work for as a subcontractor with their account and their identity.
And I launch Edge on Linux with my personal profile, once with the clients profile and it all syncs and it all just works.
And I have to say Edge is remarkably stable and remarkably fast on Linux on Mint as well and it's a daily driver and it's my daily workplace and it's my daily place where I interact with everything I need to do.
I do my Teams calls via the browser and everything just works on Linux and it's absolutely fine.
The added value of course of working on Linux is that I can have all of my favorite command line apps at my fingertips and I do have quite a few.
I have on that machine, I'm running a T-mux session, so a Windows terminal session that I connect to either locally or I can connect to remotely and this is where it becomes interesting for me because when I want to interact with all of these things like for example my chat clients, my IRC clients,
my Twitter clients and my mail and stuff like that, I try to do that via the command line. That has to do with the fact that I love the command line because it's not the browser that I work in every day.
It's this different world where I do funky things and where I do my creative things and which also gives me the ability to be very flexible in what I want to do.
So I've got a Spotify client in there which is NCSpot, I listen to my podcasts with Kistero, I read my articles, my RSS feeds with newsboat, I chat with my friends on IRC using IRSSI and stuff like that.
So I have all the command line or the command line or the text user interface applications that I use every day and I put them on the separate monitors so they're always there should I need them.
And that is my daily workspace when I want to work.
Now when the evening comes around my work for the client or for my own company is done and I walk away from the machine I do keep the machine running day and night because I do want to be able to connect to it from other devices in the house.
And here it becomes interesting because I can use whatever laptop I want to use that can either be my MacBook that can be my iPad or that can be a Linux machine that I have lying around to connect to that command line session to connect to that session via TMAX.
So when I go downstairs and I want to continue doing something that I was doing on the command line or on whatever I don't know stuff I'm working on I can just SSH into that machine and continue where I left off and that way I have kind of a continuous connection to whatever fun stuff that I want to do without having to log the entire machine around.
And here comes the fun part I really like working on the command line because it's such a different interface to my digital environment than the browser that I am in every day and that really separates work and play for me that really helps in achieving that goal.
So using my iPad I use the I think it's terminus application to connect via SSH to the machine upstairs and do whatever I want to do.
And when I'm on my Windows machine I have a Surface Pro I use the Windows Terminal Preview or I use the MOBA X-Term application and with MOBA X-Term the additional bonus is that I can even run X applications
through X forwarding from the machine upstairs on whatever machine that I connect to so on the Windows machine and that way my Linux environment kind of extends towards the other devices that I have in the house.
And this has brought me to this situation where I try to balance my work and my creative life by working on sorry here's a big train.
That's a long train sorry for that that's what you get when you live on the main rail road from Antwerp to Cologne where there's of course a lot of freight going from the Antwerp harbor to the industrial area in the North Rhine West following in Germany.
So as I was saying the current setup that I have balances the fact that I have a separation between work and play without having a division within work and play so I can still have that continuous environment where I'm still connected to files and applications no matter what I'm on but I do have the ability to step away from the computer and use another interface
be that my tablet be that another laptop to interact with my digital environment and that is how I work.
The only additional interface that I forgot to mention is the fact that I do use a Surface Pro X for taking notes because I've always had a fondness for...
I've also always had a fondness for being able to write on an interface and being able to write on a computer and use handwriting to study and stuff.
And I've been using a iPad for the other stuff of for basic content consumption being watching YouTube and taking notes and stuff like that.
And that is my digital workplace using Linux as a daily driver and using the combination of a web-based interface and Chrome and a command line interface over SSH linked to multiple devices either a laptop that's roaming or a tablet that's around as my digital workplace and that's how I work.
Maybe I've inspired you, maybe you want to share how you work in the new way of working where we're not going to the office anymore and we don't have a work laptop and a laptop for home that we're all redesigning our digital environments and our finding new ways to stay sane and divide the thing we need to do with the things that we want to do.
So I'm very curious what your input is until then if I hear a show from you record one, send it on to Ken and record your own HPR.
This was Nightwise. You can find more about me on www.nightwise.com. That's caniGHTISE.com. Sorry for the wind noise. This was recorded quickly on my phone using my lapel mic.
So forgive the audio quality. I hope you enjoyed the content. See you guys next time. Bye-bye.
I'm endlessly scrolling through it and consuming it. Record a podcast. Do it for HPR. Talk about that wicked project that you want to do and talk about how you did it.
Talk about how you made time for it and how you did that crazy project and what it was in it for you because you will remember that technology and the internet and the digital connections that we have these days are extremely empowering and give us the ability to find so much joy in our life.
Bring joy in the life of others and not be this senseless dread of all becoming those mindless, consuming drones that just click next whenever you want to.
So that's my challenge. I hope you found it the show interesting and I'll put a link to the book and the two authors in the show notes. Bye guys.
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