Why all of the Ubuntu hate?

I've been using Ubuntu (mostly) as my primary operating system since version 5.10; that's 8 years of Ubuntu on my desktop.

I honestly believe that Ubuntu has done more to get Linux recognized as a viable desktop operating system than anyone. Sure, Red Hat/Fedora does great, innovative things for the Linux ecosystem as a whole, but I'm talking specifically about on the desktop.

Sometimes I listen too much. I let people sway my opinions on things, and I really shouldn't. I'm getting better at that. I also probably follow too many people on Google+, and that causes a bunch of ideas, idioms, philosophies and such to get thrown at me on a daily basis.

Starting back in March, I got caught up in a huge distro-hopping/desktop hopping rut (as I'm sure you know if you follow me on Google+). Because of some of the things people whom I respect were saying, I felt that if I cared about Linux, I shouldn't be using Ubuntu. I think that is wrong.

I started trying other distributions and I even tried some of the derivatives of Ubuntu along the way. The only thing besides Ubuntu that has stuck anywhere is I'm running Ubuntu GNOME on my laptop. I'm not going to get into all of the details of why I prefer GNOME on my laptop and Unity on my desktop, but lets just say that's where I've settled. In fact, Unity would be just as fine on the laptop as well, but I like GNOME Shell better there than on my dual-monitor desktop, and I do want to keep up with what's going on with GNOME. Also, although I'm not a big gamer anymore, I think it's super awesome that Steam if available for Linux now, and my games performed noticeably worse under GNOME than any other desktop - in fact, it was the only desktop where I noticed a discernible difference.

Okay, I started rambling. Back on point.

Ubuntu works. It just simply works. It works just as well as Windows or Mac OS. I think Canonical is doing amazing things still yet. I can't wait to have an Ubuntu phone. It may end up being a niche phone, but I will carry my Ubuntu phone as proudly as die-hard MS fans carry their Windows Phones (which, BTW, I also think is excellent).

There has been talk of Wayland taking over for X.org...talk. For a long time, and it still hasn't happened yet. Ubuntu did something about it. The created Mir, and are doing a lot of work to make the transition happen. Sometimes you have to make a bold move to drive innovation, and I think that is what Canonical is doing. It may be painful for a while, but I think desktop Linux will be better for it.

I've never been more excited about Ubuntu or Linux in general than I am right now. I can't wait to be running Mir and Unity next on my desktop. I'm sure many people in my circles will disagree with me on this, but it's just how I feel.

Something finally clicked, and I think I can finally use what I like, what I feel the best about, take other peoples opinions in stride (no matter how much I respect them) and get on with it and not let every single post I read on G+ send me off in a distro-hopping frenzy again.

You have no excuses.

I'm gonna start this by saying if you haven't read this, go read it now. I'll wait until you get back. If you have already read that post you can go ahead and keep reading.

So, back in February, Feb 22 to be exact, I injured myself. I was out of work from then until April 1. I spent most of that time in bed. In pain.

Long story short, the main part of the injury has gone away, but I have been left with Foot Drop due to a hematoma pressing on my sciatic nerve. I hope it is not permanent and use of my foot will come back, but it is an unknown at this time.

It sucks. I mean, it really sucks. But you know what? I haven't let it stop me. I just walked over 5 miles (5.19 to be exact). It took me an hour and forty one minutes. I started getting mad when I was walking. I was mad that I couldn't run. I was mad because I saw other people running. I was wishing, hoping, and would have given anything to be running instead of limping along like I was. My hip started getting sore. I have a weird gate to keep from tripping over my toes now. It sucks. It really sucks. I lie in bed every night and try...try so hard to move my foot, but it just won't move. It makes me mad. It sucks, it really sucks.

But.

I just walked over 5 miles. It took me an hour and forty one minutes to do it, but I walked 5.19 miles to be exact.

I've been to the gym every day for the past two weeks too. I can't run, but I can use the elliptical. I can get on a bike, and I can lift weights (staying light lower-body right now, but I'm lifting!).

It sucks. I can't concentrate on anything. My mind is consumed with the fact that I cannot move my foot.

It sucks.

It really sucks.

But, I can't change it. I can only hope that one day my foot will move again, and I can run. I hope it happens before September so I can run the Darlington Marathon.

It sucks, it really sucks, but I can't change it.

If you think you have an excuse that is keeping you from exercising, I promise you don't. The only think keeping you from exercising is you and unlike me and my foot you can change that. You just have to get up off of your ass and start moving.

One step. Then another. You can do it. You just have to try.

You have no excuse.

Now, get up and go walk.

First look at Ubuntu 13.04 and a reflection on a month with Arch

I've always had a little bit of "distrohopper" in me. I'd usually get bored and want to try something new after reading about it.

Almost always I end up back on Ubuntu after a while. I've really been using Ubuntu pretty much exclusively since 2005.

Last year I switched exclusively to Fedora for a while (about 9 months) because I was having to use RHEL/CentOS at work and needed to learn more about it. It was painful for me, not because Fedora is bad or anything, it's just not my ideal desktop distribution. It was the longest I'd ever stuck with something besides Ubuntu. As soon as I was comfortable with the Red Hat tool-set (and the fact I moved from being a Server Admin to a Software Developer at work), I moved back to Ubuntu.

Recently I got sucked into a huge distro-hopping rutt. I had a lot going on personally, I would become easily frustrated and I was being influenced by the ideals of others.

I'm gonna be a little candid and honest here as to why, and then tell you why I changed my mind in the following paragraphs.

When I first heard about Mir (the new display server being developed by Canonical), my first thought was "Cool!, something that sucks less than X will be coming up". Then I started letting myself be influenced some folks in the open source community who really care about such things and then I started thinking "Hey Canonical! You are evil, you shouldn't do that". I tried out a couple of distros on for size. Soon after, I was back on Ubuntu, but decided to "stick it to the man" and run Kubuntu instead, and then I started having some pretty weird performance issues under Kubuntu 13.04 (still in Beta, or maybe even pre-beta at the time) and tried Arch one more time.

I've been on Arch for the most part for a couple of months now. The distro is pretty awesome. I really liked how much I learned while using it and setting it up on various boxes, and I got really good at going through the installation process. I also got really frustrated with trying to find a DE I liked better than Unity. While there were many things I liked about Arch, there were a few things I didn't like.

• There were some packages I wanted, but weren't in the repos, but were in AUR. I didn't like AUR. I don't like going outside of a distro (one of the problems I had with Fedora), I don't even like using PPA's on Ubuntu. I like sticking w/ the repos. I made due, but I wasn't comfortable relying on packages maintained by community people who may or may not update them, or ensure their security.
• I got things working okay in all of the DE's I tried, but nothing felt very smooth or integrated. I would work along fine, and then run into a wall by finding something that didn't work (like mounting a USB drive, or using my keyboards multi-media keys, or something like that), and although I'd eventually get it working, it was a huge pain in the you-know-what to stop what I was doing, get off track by trying to figure out how to fix $PROBLEM and then go back to what I was doing originally, when there were many other distros out there that "just work".
• I never got my fonts right. I tried the "Ubuntu" packages and Infinality packages from AUR (again, I hated having to use AUR), tweaked my config files to no end, and never did get them just the way I wanted. In Ubuntu, I have to do nothing the fonts are just beautiful, in any of the variants and DE's.
• Speaking of fonts, although Steam is in the Arch repos, and it works pretty well, the fonts are practically unreadable in games. Before connecting to a CS:Source server, in the "Find Server" window, the fonts are so tiny and jagged, it's nearly impossible to read, and in game, the chat text is pretty bad also.
• Also, sure, Arch is a system where you set it up with exactly what you want, but in reality an installed system wasn't using any less resources, or taking up much less space than Ubuntu would. The things that were not installed were mostly insignificant things (that often I'd discover later, like in the above paragraph that I needed/wanted anyway).
• The Arch Community...okay, I won't go there. It's Arch.
• Not sure if this ties into the "community" comment but it was very off-putting to me to find that the "arch-general" mailing list was moderated. I'd never run into that before for a public mailing list.
• I was totally paranoid about updates. I constantly felt my system may eat itself one day, even though many people told me it wouldn't.
• I played too much. Pacman was really cool, and it was easy to rip out huge chunks of packages and replace them with others...almost too easy for someone like me. I was endlessly tweaking and trying new things and not getting much at all accomplished.

Well, while that sounds like a lot of negatives, it was a really good experience overall. I learned tons, about a new distribution I'd never used before, and I'm happier for it. Here are some positives I took away from Arch:

• You have to know your system. You can't just blindly update, and you have to understand how to manually change settings that are either automagically set for you in other distributions or give you a tool for configuration.
• The concept of a rolling-release is not only brilliant, but something I think should be at least offered in all distros that support updating a live system.
• There is no default DE, no default set of applications, you can take a base system and mold it into whatever you want to make of it. When you are done, if successful, you could ideally have a perfect system.
• The documentation on the Wiki is second to none in the Linux world. I knew this before even trying Arch, because I can't tell you how many times I've used information from the Arch wiki to solve problems in other distros.
• Although I took a jab at the general Arch community in the list above, for the most part, anyone in the Arch IRC channels or mailing lists are very knowledgeable and can likely help if you (if they will). 

That being said, it was time to come back to reality and get on with things.

Ubuntu 13.04 released today, and I blew away Arch and installed it (even if it means +Alan Pope is gonna pick on me again). It's a great release, has good performance and I'm not unhappy with any part of the distro or the DE (Unity). Everything just works, and I had it all set up in under an hour. I'm one of the folks who actually liked Unity mostly from the beginning (well, at least since 11.10 - 11.04 was still kinda rough).

I'm not an Open Source activist, and I don't have a horse in the race in regards to Mir/Wayland.
Sure I care about open source, and I wish Canonical either gave more back upstream, or did a better job at communicating with upstream, or did a better job of letting everyone know that they already do the previous two things (which ever is applicable).

While I care about Open Source, Open Standards, Free Software and all that jazz, I also care about being able to play games, watch videos, listen to MP3's, and do all the stuff that normal people do on a computer every day. Ubuntu does that for me. It does that for me without me having to follow documentation, add third-party repositories or do anything other than just install the distro, apt-get the extra packages I want and get on with it. Ubuntu is not only great for the average, non-technical user who perhaps isn't familiar with Linux in general, it's great for those of us who are more advanced users because it allows us to get on with what we want and need to do and not be bothered by our operating system.

Overall I think, personally that Ubuntu has done more for Desktop Linux than any other distro. I also hope they find a sustainable revenue stream, and can gain some ground in the server market mostly dominated by RHEL/SLES, although, I think they will remain the gold standard in the big Enterprise Linux arena. I do think Ubuntu should focus on doing what they do best, and that is providing an exceptional end user/consumer Linux experience, but my opinion and $3.50 will get you a coffee at Starbucks.

As for Ubuntu 13.04:
My only real complaint? It really hurts something inside of me that the first thing I have to do after installing any Linux distro is go to Settings -> Privacy and turn things off.

Kudos to Newegg!

I just have to give a shout-out to Newegg. Usually, you only hear people gripe and whine about a company when something goes wrong. Well, back in February, I did just that, in public on Twitter when I was buying the stuff to build my new machine. I generally don't do that, and I don't generally like it when other people do either. I'm not sure what got into me, but it struck me wrong, and I did it.

What happened was, when I ordered my stuff initially, I bought a Core i5 CPU. After getting everything put together, I decided I wanted a Core i7 instead to get Hyper-threading (which does help when running multiple VM's, among other things). Well, I listed the i5 on eBay, and ordered an i7, with the extra $2.99 for "Rush Processing" and extra for Next Day shipping - the order was placed very early in the morning as well. By 5PM, the order was still in "Processing" (or something like that), and I knew it was too late to get on a brown truck, a plane, another brown truck and make it to my door by E.O.B. the next day. I whined on Twitter, like I hate to see people do.

I was almost immediately contacted by Newegg. It was genuinely a mistake in the order process, and although they couldn't get the CPU to me by the next day, but they promised to make it right. What had made me upset, is that not only would the CPU not get to me the next day, the next day was Friday, which meant I wouldn't get the CPU until Monday. It was supposed to be raining Monday, and not only that, nobody was going to be home to receive the package, meaning it was going to sit in the rain. Luckily the forecast was wrong, it didn't rain, the CPU didn't get wet, and it was waiting on my doorstep when I got home from the doctor on that Monday.

(Side note: this was the same doctors appointment where I got the now (in)famous cortisone shot that caused a side effect, muscle spasm, hemorrhage and resulted in my lingering foot drop...)

Anyway, Newegg, did make it right. Much to my surprise, they credited $100 back to my Paypal account. I was blown away. So, the net result: I sold my i5 on eBay for only slightly less than I originally paid. The i7 was ~$100 more than the i5 was, so I nearly got a free i5 -> i7 upgrade, all because I was a jerk on Twitter.

I actually felt bad. The one time I whine on Twitter, I not only get my way, but it actually felt unfair to me.

So...fast forward to this week. As I mentioned on Google+ recently, I had this little Socket 1156 system in my closet that was missing a CPU, Memory and HDD. I ordered a used Clarkdale i3 from Amazon, 4GB of DDR3 and a small 32GB Adata SSD from Newegg and rebuilt it. It was a pretty snappy little machine, and I really enjoyed having a second somewhat decent machine around to play with (which will result in me leaving my main machine alone!).

Well, two days later, I started receiving errors on boot-up which indicated corruption on my EXT4 file system. The first time I was actually able to recover. I did a fsck /dev/sda1 from the rootfs shell I was dropped into, let it fix it's errors, but I apparently lost some files to corruption (seemed to be fonts, and maybe other things, who knows, but LXDM was missing fonts for sure). I let Pacman do it's magic with a pacman -Qeq | pacman -S - which re-installed all installed packages, and to my amazement that seemed to fix it...until 2 reboots later. I knew I needed to RMA this drive because it was obviously not going to last.

I noticed on Newegg's site when I went to initiate the RMA, that the Adata drive was only able to be returned for exchange (for the same model) only. This was disappointing, but I should've read that first, and I should've trusted my gut and not bought an unknown cheapo drive like that. I really didn't want another one of those drives, because I knew I couldn't ever really trust it. Even though this was an unimportant machine, I did want it to work.

So, I sent an e-mail to Newegg customer support, and the first response was a canned "Sorry, {reiterate what the website already said about exchanging for same model}, Thanks, and have a nice day.

I replied back saying something to the effect of: "Hi, I fully understand that, and it's my mistake for reading that first, but I really don't trust this model drive with my data, and I would love to just be able to exchange it for a better drive".

I didn't hear anything else back for a few hours, but eventually got an e-mail saying that they would issue me a "refund" RMA. They even sent me a prepaid UPS label to ship the defective drive back.

That's simply a great example of taking care of your customers, and that is the reason why I will continue to use Newegg for my hardware purchases.

Perhaps you've had bad experiences with them, but these are the only two issues I've ever had with Newegg, and they made them both right; the first one even going way beyond what I expected, wanted or what they needed to do.

I'm now looking forward to my Crucial m4 SSD arriving tomorrow to bring this little machine back to life again :-)

Font Configuration in Arch Linux

I'm fairly particular about font rendering on my PC. In Ubuntu, my fonts always rendered nearly perfect, in my opinion right out of the box. In any other distro, I have to do a little tweaking to get things just right.

I didn't have to do a lot to get my fonts beautiful in Arch, and I thought I would document here, in hopes it may help someone else. Remember, font rendering is a very personal thing, and what I like may look horrible to you. Be sure to check out the Font Configuration Page on the Arch Wiki for more suggestions and possible configurations.

First, my goal was to see how good I could get my fonts before relying on patched packages from the AUR. Although there are Infinality and Ubuntu patched packages available there, I wanted to stick with as few AUR packages on my box as possible, and I had read that freetype2 had been improved upstream recently, so I wanted to see how they would look with solid configurations using the default packages.

First, I created a .Xresources file and added the following to it:


I also added the followng to my /etc/fonts/local.conf and my ~/.fonts.conf
(I'm sure it doesn't need to be in both places, but I put it in my $HOME so I can sync to my dotfiles repo easily).


I've also set the font options in Xfce like so:

Ultimately, I was extremely happy with the results and felt no need for external patched packages.

Here are a few more screenshots to give you an idea of how the fonts look in various applications.

Terminator:

Thunar (click for full size):

Firefox (click for full size):

There you go! Maybe these settings will help you, and if not, be sure to explore the Wiki - there are tons of configuration options available.

Dotfiles

I love exploring folks' dotfile repos on Github. I always find some neat ideas that way. I decided to create a public dotfile repo of my own here, so feel free to look around.

I'm now on Arch

Outside of Ubuntu (and it's derivatives) Arch seems to have the best Steam and Nvidia support of any distro I've tried.

I got Arch all set up a couple of weeks ago, and then psyched myself out worrying about how stable it would be long term. After doing more research and talking to some folks, I feel those worries were unfounded.

I reloaded Arch, with Xfce4 and it's a pretty snappy setup. Nvidia works as expected, and so does Steam.

Why another switch? Kubuntu 13.04 was dog slow. It wasn't a throughput issue - I got decent framerates in games, and if I did a timed kernel build, it was in line with where it should be, but the entire UI was lagging. An example would be that Dolphin (the KDE file manager) took on average 2 seconds to launch. Even if I closed it and relaunched it right away. Sure, 2 seconds isn't a long time, but when you have a overclocked i7 and an SSD, you shouldn't have to wait 2 seconds for just your file manager to pop open.

Anyway, I'm gonna ride this Arch train for a while and see how comfortable it is. If I don't like it long-term, there is always Tanglu coming.