OS x to Linux as a pro photographer
I recently wrote a post “I replaced OS X with Linux” . This series of articles is a follow up of that article, where I will explain in depth about my switching progress.
Part 1. Choosing my linux flavour
Intro
When you want to make the switch to Linux, the first thing to do is to find your way in the plethora of linux distributions. It doesn’t stop at just choosing your distro. You also need to choose a desktop environment and/or window manager.
Before I can explain what I ‘ve chosen and why. I have to explain what a distribution, desktop and window manager are.
Distribution or distro
According to wikipedia a distro is the following:
A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection, which is based upon the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system.
For people that know Linux this is an obvious definition. In everyday speak this means, that a distribution is the system where in you run your programs. It’s a collection of programs that are using the kernel or base system of linux and often make use of an package management system or sort of application store to install programs.
There are about 500 activily maintained different or slightly different systems. They are mostly derived from a couple of base distributions and package manager systems.
More about that on wikipedia.
Window manager and Desktop environments
A operating system can work without a window manager and a desktop, however most users will not be able to work without a window manager or desktop, me included.
The window manager takes care of the drawing of the windows on screen, it takes care of the appearance of those windows.
The desktop on the other hand takes care of the other parts that make up the graphical interface, meaning the icons, the menu and the consistency of appearance menus, taskbar, …
That will be enough theory for now.
If you want go find out more about window managers and desktop environments
So what did I choose and why?
The distro
Here is the list of every distro I tried since I considered switching:
- Arch
- Antergos
- Debian
- Fedora
- Elementary
- Manjaro
- Mint
- Opensuse
- Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Unity)
The 3 final contenders
3. Ubuntu
When you are looking around for which linux to install, you’ll quickly get directed towards Ubuntu or Linux mint. So I went ahead and installed Ubuntu, a distro based on Debian, a distro I have had installed on several servers in the past.
My problem with Ubuntu and Debian based distros is that although they have an enorm catalog of programs, the programs in that catalog are mostly out of date with the newest releases. For most programs that is ok, although some programs just don’t work because dependencies are not up to date. When you have a program that’s out of date and you need it updated, you are in for a lot of tweaking and adding third party repositories. Something I did not want to do as I always try to be as up to date as possible.
As I needed the latest version of darktable and some other applications, I quickly ran into the above problem, so that ruled out Ubuntu for me.
2. Fedora
After Ubuntu I did some more research and stumbled upon Fedora studio a distro aimed at creative people. So I tried it, initially I liked Fedora, I actually liked it a lot. However, the package manager although mostly more up to date than ubuntu has way less programs and is even harder to consistently add third party repositories. So after a while I abandoned fedora also.
1. Antergos
From the previous experiences I learned that I wanted a distro with a big catalog of programs through the package manager and most importantly one that is up to date.
So after a little more research I found out about arch linux, a bit scared to loose a lot of time to do a complete install of arch linux and to make a mistake so that I have to start over. I opted to use Antergos, which is Arch linux with a visual installer and a standard install of a bunch of programs.
Next to the reasons above, I also like the fact that Antergos/Arch is using rolling upgrades and no release cycles. This means that you don’t do 1 big update every so often months, but daily you can do small updates.
The advantage is that you can more easily find out what package caused a problem and easily revert back. On the downside, you also have more chance of breaking something because you are on the bleeding edge.
I don’t mind the bleeding edge and I’m prepared to deal with the problems if necessary.
Desktop enviroments and Window managers
The list of DE and WM I tried:
- Awesome WM
- Deepin
- Enlightenment
- Gnome
- KDE
- Lxde
- Mate
- Pantheon
- Unity
- Xfce
The 3 contenders
screenshots are not my personal ones. I forgot to do them.
3. Gnome
I first installed all distros with Gnome as the desktop environment. Once I settled in on Antergos, I noticed that Gnome was too restrictive for me. I could not adapt everything I want or needed. Also as I was testing on my macbook I had problems with gnome crashing and using too much resources.
2. XFCE
After Gnome I went to XFCE, a desktop that’s lightweight a long standing history and loads of plugins. I kinda like it, but it’s a lot of work to get it completely tricked out like the one in the screenshot and it’s quite ugly in stock config. I used it a long time during my testing and I was at 90% to declare it the one to use.
1. Awesome WM
Something I always missed in desktops, was a decent way to arrange windows. I don’t like floating windows, so when I started to read about tiling window managers, my interest was peaked.
A tiling window manager doesn’t allow windows to float over each other. This makes for a very clean and ordered desktop.
You can have several desktops and have programs only open up on specific desktops, this means you never have to search for a window.
Next to that you have alt+tab on steriods. You can completely browse and move windows around with keyboard shortcuts. It all justs snaps into place If you wan to change the window size, you quickly tab Mod+h or Mod+l to expand or shrink a window.
However configuring and styling it, can only be done editing a config file in the lua programming language. Which is something I only do when I have a bit of time left, hence the inconsistent color between an icon and it’s background in my taskbar.
Conclusion
I did try several distros over the last months, I also did try a lot of different graphical interfaces.
I did this in the beginning on my late 2012 13" Macbook Pro, since the beginning november I’m also on a new desktop pc. So I had 2 PC’s to try and test out several distro’s/DE at the same time. Which made choosing a bit more easy, because I could use them side by side.
I learned that once you got a base setup, with the right programs, good settings and you know what you want on your computer, it’s quite quick to setup everything like you want it. Because you can easily port config files between different setups and computers.
So now, I’m trying out new things on the laptop and having a stable config on my desktop, which is my main working machine.
Is it easy choosing a distro, not at all. But once you have used 1 distro for a certain amount of time, you’ll quickly know what you don’t want in another distro, this narrows down the decision funnel quite quickly.
In following part of this series I’ll go deeper in on the everyday apps, like e-mail, browser, file manager and more
