So, be cautious on what type of media your operating system lives. I am not a specialist, but I prefer to use now a 7200 rpm hard disk for the system. Maybe it was not Linux’s fault, but I tend to believe that somehow, the very frequent writing of logs and other information to the disk had a catastrophic effect. My major problem since using Linux has been the death of the system SSD in December last year, 8 months after buying the workstation. I spent some time as well with XFCE, my distribution of choice for my 12 year old laptop, and with MATE. On the workstation, Cinnamon, a GTK3-based DE from the Linux Mint creators, works flawlessly. KDE Plasma is probably my “go to” distribution if I take my laptop on a journey, since I am sure that external monitors, for example, are correctly recognized. The current blog post is written under a Gnome Shell environment, which, with extensions, works mostly as I want it to work. So, no, you won’t find here any of the “The 5 best desktop environments for Linux” non-sense. It has been my pleasure to test and work for some time with most of the major desktop environments and, strangely enough, I like them all. While it might seem a minor issue for most of the system administrators who use Linux servers mostly through a command line interface, the desktop environment has a major impact on Linux used through a graphical user interface. The use of ZFS is probably a headache for most users, and unfortunately I did not have enough time to do more than basic configuration. The data, which are also mirrored daily to an external network disk, are thus duplicated among the two disks, without any need for further configuration. The most difficult part was the assignment of the two data disk to a zfs pool in a ‘mirrored’ configuration. Initial installation required endless updates for the preinstalled Windows system, reducing the size of the Windows partition and installation of Ubuntu. Ubuntu 17.04 was thus installed on a Dell machine with plenty of RAM, an SSD disk for the system (more on this later) and two 2 Tb data disks. I still like the way Macs work and how the desktop looks, but the lack of a Pro solution in latest years, as well as the steady development of user-friendliness in Linux, settled the decision. It was not an easy choice to change after 18 years of Mac use. In addition to generic Linux documentation, one of the best sources of information on arcane Linux configuration options is the ArchWiki, a documentation portal for ArchLinux (which you can try in a user-friendly version called Manjaro). Many thanks to those which asked and answered questions, as well as to those sharing their experience with specific issues of application install or configuration. The size of the Ubuntu users community is very important, since many questions that I might have had were already asked and answered by someone. Based on my previous experience with Ubuntu, I chose it, because “it just works”. The theme can be applied with the Gnome Tweaks application.Īn important choice when switching to Linux is the distribution, as it affects several aspects of the linuxian life. The easiest way to install the theme is to download and unzip the corresponding file in a. Last, but not least, the extensive experience with shell and shell scripts, was crucial for data analysis projects both for research and in teaching.īefore going further, I would like to share with you a desktop screenshot, showing my current theme in Gnome, OneStepBack. Experience with the command line definitely helped for the administration of our laboratory backup server, a Sinology network disk station. For example, our collection of reagents is maintained on a LabKey server on Ubuntu in a virtual machine. Using Ubuntu at home had an impact on my daily professional life. I first tested Linux on my laptop in 20 but was only convinced to permanently switch to using it for my personal use with the arrival of Ubuntu Dapper Drake in 2006. This post assumes you have some knowledge of Linux, specifically how to install applications and how to edit configuration files. Still, there are plenty of things that are better done on a desktop, including computation-heavy or specialized analyses. With the ubiquity of web applications, the desktop environment might seem less important than a few years ago. If you consider switching to Linux from a Windows or OS X machine, you will find some of my experience in this post, one year after starting to use Linux exclusively for my professional life as a scientist.
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