Please be warned before posting here: this is going to be an experiment where I’d like to be extremely positive and want everyone participating to also be extremely positive. I want to melt your teeth with the sweetness! I stopped contributing to open source in my free time because the whole community seemed so hateful and angry, it went from dualbooting with Linux because it was cool to have it on the side, to hating everything else and therefore using Linux. At least that’s what I was experiencing so I want to see if a negativity-free topic could inspire me a bit more!
I’ll start with one, and will write more over time:
PowerTOP is awesome! PowerTOP is a command line utility that lets you quickly apply some battery saving tweaks when you unplug your laptop, so it will stay alive a little while longer. Install it using sudo apt install powertop, sudo dnf install powertop, sudo pacman -S powertop, or your distribution equivalent. Activate the quick power consumption tweaks using sudo powertop --auto-tune. You can apply the tweaks during boot time, and if there’s interest I’ll share a cool service file for it!
GNOME is awesome! If you’re familiar with the GNOME Tweaks app, you might know how to set the default font for apps different from the distribution default. To additionally change the font of the shell, install the User Themes extension, and open the terminal. Inside the terminal write mkdir -p ~/.themes/shellFont/gnome-shell, then gedit ~/.themes/shellFont/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css. Inside the text editor, write *{font-family:"name" !important;} where ‘name’ is the name of the font you want to use. Afterwards, select the new theme as Shell theme. Some fonts are more compatible than others, if it looks very much off, then try disabling hinting in the Tweaks app.
Thanks oldgeek! You can always write something you think is awesome in Linux! That’s what I’m doing.
I am not very familiar with the nuts and bolts of Linux. I do like the ability to take old hardware, hardware that runs perfectly well, and that has been abandoned by the manufacturer as to support and make something useful out of it. I am running health software on an old Dell laptop, long abandoned as to support by Dell. I have Xubuntu on it.
FreeType is awesome! If you run into emoji on the internet that look black and white, or when there are emoji in the title of a website and it looks monochrome, then your distribution is likely choosing symbols instead of the coloured emoji. Check for yourself on a website like https://emojipedia.org/people/. If you want coloured emoji everywhere, open a terminal and become root using sudo su then backup your current font configuration using: cp /etc/fonts/local.conf /etc/fonts/local.conf-backup and then run: curl -o /etc/fonts/local.conf https://pastebin.com/raw/atfUQQ2j and you should be set! Try visiting https://emojipedia.org/people/ again and see if it looks any different. It might take a reboot! If you want to restore to the default, run cp /etc/fonts/local.conf-backup /etc/fonts/local.conf and everything is back to how it was.
Ideally it will look similar to this:
@oldgeek That sounds, well, awesome! It’s great to be able to minimise waste like that.
What I wish I had time for is to learn Darktable and Rawtherapee. While I have toyed with them a bit, there is so much there and, for me, so little time. I have read of some professional photographers doing a workflow using Linux with these and other photo tools.
Hmmm. This is going to be tough for me. Because I have somewhat migrated away from Linux to FreeBSD…It started with my dislike (abject hatred) of systemd. I won’t go on a rant here, but my work laptop runs Devuan, but my personal laptop and desktop run FreeBSD 12-RELEASE, with a very nice KDE desktop.
I also recommend, if you are not using it (and if the kernel devs don’t kill it) ZFS on Linux (ZoL). The ZFS filesystem is, aside from being bulletproof, self-repairing, and all around awesome, in a position to replace VFAT/FAT32 as the universal filesystem. It is available on FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, Mac, and Windows. And I have an external drive that I can mount on my Linux box, or any of my FreeBSD ones.
I thought I’d go and start contributing again way back, and it’s just not worth it for me. Clear Linux is good about things, but most other distributions are just too focused on putting barriers to communication, change and new things, instead of communicating, changing and getting new things.
Around the same time, somewhere completely unrelated to Linux or anything, I mentioned I made these software related things and if people would like, I’d upload them. People have been super positive and tweeting about it with plenty of hearts while it’s just sharing what I do for myself, so I figured why bother dealing with open source crowds!
@garec so cool, especially how long it’s been going for!
@VulcanRidr ha that’s funny I find the Linux kernel the most buggy and unwieldy software and I really enjoy systemd! Probably no wonder why WSL has become my second most used Linux environment on a day to day basis! But to each their own of course. My podcasts would become a snooze fest if everyone had the same preferences and experiences.
Yeah, I’m an old and set-in-my-ways fart. I’ve been doing Unix and Linux for the better part of a quarter century, and don’t like change for the sake of change, which is what seems to be the purpose of a lot of systemd changes.
…when you can create your own open-source crowd. ; )
That’s the true OS attitude there, you wanted something better so you’re making it and sharing. Everything else is just decoration.
