Standard Mischief

Look, y’all claim to be the 99%, but if you really want to represent me, I’ll have to see a wee bit more “Let the banks fail, lock up the criminal executives that broke numerous laws and recall Barny Frank”, and a whole lot less “General strike on the international socialist world holiday, May Day, in solidarity with our comrades in arms in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela.”

Just saying.

Just me going all off topic on one of y’alls blogs:

6) It’s called “prepping” and it’s almost socially acceptable now if you at least make a few jokes about a zombie apocalypse, (and it has nothing at all to do with those crazy survivalist wackjob nut-cases, so stop looking at me like that…)

I always wonder how loud hipsters would scream to OSHA if they were _forced_ by their employer to ride a fixie bike without adequate brakes on both front and rear wheels and an exposed drive train that can’t freewheel and doesn’t have a guard to protect the chainring from eating your pants leg.

I started with Ubuntu 12.04Alpha2, and found that the “Unity” desktop crap was all they supported.

I test drove Arch, but I didn’t like the whole “rolling distro” idea to be a good idea. I want things to work, even if they are outdated. A rolling distro sounds like you are stuck in Beta all the time.

Then I tried Linux Mint, except the KDE flavor. This was almost right. There’s a default empty folder on the desktop for some reason with absolutely no explanation for why it’s there, except maybe it’s because they want to show off their “dare to be different” window controls. The “exciting” news is that they are on the side. This is obviously to show you that at KDE, they started with a blank sheet of paper. I can roll with the funky windowing system, but decided to ditch it when I could not make heads or tails out of the little icons and the KDE folk totally forgot to use “tool-tips”

I see no value in fighting my windowing manager. I have booted up recent versions of Puppy, BackTrack, and Parted Magic and had no issues moving around and trying all the widgets. Thus I’m not going to waste my time figuring out Unity or KDE. (If I _had_ to choose one or the other though, it would be KDE, but no praise for the second least sucky GUI.)

So now I’m giving Linux Mint 12 x64 with Gnome Classic the extended test drive. I’m dual booting with my older Ubuntu for the meanwhile.

Five minutes later I knew it wasn’t for me. Seriously, what does it take to run nmap from Unity desktop? No terminal. No “Run” (at least that I could find.) I mean it might work for me if I was building a kiosk or some other locked down interface.

I have a bad habit of not upgrading when things are working well for me, but Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was getting mighty long of tooth. So I decided to try 12.04 alpha release 2, because that is the next version with long term support. Let me tell you how much I hate getting comfortable again after I build myself a new machine. No way am I going to stay on the head of a 6 month release schedule.

I really like the 10.04 Ubuntu, as the GUI makes easy GUI stuff easy. Still, I do have a few grievances to air:

1. When I mount a resource using the GUI, I expect that I can also see them by issuing “mount” at the command line. In 10.04 at least, a USB stick will be shown, but a remote share won’t.
2. The Nautilus file browser won’t stick to a consistent interface. If I change the current working directory to another after setting “list view” from “icon view”, the file browser shouldn’t fscking jump back into the “icon view” again when I click on another folder.
3. When using  Nautilus, if I browse to a directory and suddenly find I need a command line, It should be easy peasy to open up a terminal window with the current working directory.  This was a feature of a version of Knoppix I was partial to, way back eight years ago or so. Advantage: KDE.
4. I also would prefer to deal with removable media (or anything in /etc/fstab but not currently mounted) the way Puppy (yes Puppy) Linux does. Namely if I plug the USB stick in, the OS detects it and puts an icon on my desktop, but does not mount it until and only until I tell it to. I know this is counter-intuitive to people who don’t grok mounting filesystems, but that’s how I roll.
5. Finally, if there was an easy way to change the desktop so it would NOT steal focus, unless I specifically approve of it beforehand for specific notifications, that would be awesome.

Anyway, as an anecdote, I booted up my work PC for the first time in months into XP, and walked out of the room. The damn thing then decided to take over and update elevendy  billion files before it would allow me to shut the thing back down cleanly. So maybe I just complain too much.  I am so glad work will be happy letting me run whatever I want on my desktop.