The New Laptop Ritual
It’s time again for a new laptop! You know the drill; it’s like moving into an unfurnished apartment. I’d like to share this moment with you, dear reader. Come join me rig my new laptop:
Thinkpad W550s
The two most popular models used by programmers are Thinkpads and MacBook Pros. Both have their cult following, and I belong to the former. Though the “W” series Thinkpads are known to be bulky powerhouses, the W550s is the slickest yet, with a battery lasting over 13 hours, packing a 3K IPS display, and taming a vicious 5th-gen Intel processor.
Ubuntu Desktop 15.10
It was a difficult choice between Arch Linux and Ubuntu. I’m in the middle of a busy grad-school semester, so Ubuntu is a local optima for me. There were no issues replacing the factory-provided Windows partition with Ubuntu, but that’s partly due to Thinkpad’s loyalty to Linux support.
3K Display
There is so much real-estate on the screen now, but it comes with a price if you’re not careful. Text will appear tiny unless you go to the Displays menu and increase the scale for menu and title bars to 1.25 or greater. As of November 2015, the pre-installed Firefox didn’t seem to support 3K resolution well, so I switched to Chrome as my default browser.
$HOME
Although everything works out of the box in Ubuntu, you’re left with bloatware. I highly recommend taking a moment to reorganize the system. For a start, clean up $HOME so it only contains 5 folders: Desktop, Downloads, src, bin, and Dropbox (or install an alternative to Dropbox). Make it a habit to move pictures, videos, and documents that you’ve downloaded from the web to Dropbox or an external hard-drive over time. All personal projects and source code should exist in the src folder. Scripts and binaries should exist in the bin folder.
Unity
Ubuntu’s default UI needs attention and beautification. First, install the Numix icon theme. Then, from the Workspace Settings in the Unity Tweak Tool, turn on the “Workspace switcher”. Remove all the icons from the launcher except Chrome and the file manager. From the Launcher menu, turn on “Auto-hide”. Remove the Amazon spyware.
Text Editor
Install Emacs. Set up MELPA so you have access to the greatest Emacs packages out there. After installing, you can lose an hour just awing at all the packages by running M-x package-list-packages. Find some inspiration on GitHub for how to customize Emacs.
Terminal
There’s nothing particularly wrong with the default bash shell. That is, until you’ve discovered Oh My Zsh.
The git integration and auto-complete are worth the switch from bash. Moreover, you should improve the gnome-terminal tab colors with this little hack.
JDK
It’s hard to get by without Java support. It’ll be necessary sooner or later. Install it now. Some of the IDEs in the next section depend on it.
IDE
I’m a loyal JetBrains fan. With a student account, you can get a year’s subscription of their products for free. Install CLion for C/C++, PyCharm for Python, and IntelliJ for Java. Extract the binaries in your bin folder. If using zsh, open up ~/.zshrc, (otherwise if using bash, open up ~/.bashrc) and append PATH=“$HOME/bin:$PATH”. Now you can open these executable binaries from the terminal without needing the specify the file-path. For completeness, install MATLAB.
SSH Key
Generate SSH Keys for authenticating with online repositories such as GitHub or BitBucket.
Wallpaper
Don’t let the default purple haze stare at you all day. Change the wallpaper. Pro tip: r/wallpapers. (This caught my eye).
Image Editor
Believe it or not, Gimp is still one of the best open source image editors out there. You will certainly need it later, might as well get it now.
That’s it for day 0!
