What are they Using — Mark Pilgrim
Essentials, 2008 edition
Well, I do now.
- Debian GNU/Linux, because of Firefox bug 354622. In particular, comment 39 outlines Debian’s position. (Yes, I know Debian still ships with non-free firmware, so Debian’s position on Firefox is inconsistent. But no firmware developer has ever tried to force Debian to “bend the DFSG a little.”)
- GNU Emacs, still.
- Iceweasel (see above) + Adblock Plus + NoScript + NoSquint + Greasemonkey.
- Pidgin (formerly GAIM).
- getmail instead of Thunderbird. It turns out I don’t actually want a desktop email client. I use Google Apps For Your Domain to manage my own address @ my own domain, and I archive it with a nightly cron job using getmail.
- gPhoto 2 instead of digiKam. It turns out I don’t actually want a photo library, just dated directories of image files imported directly from my camera.
- On the other hand, I do want a music library, and amaroK is still best-of-breed.
- KSnapshot, KTorrent, Konversation, k3b, and k9copy are also best-of-breed.
- There is still no good iMovie clone for Linux, but OpenMovieEditor looks promising. I learned about it at FSOSS last week. I fear that Linux video editing will always just “look promising.”
- I’ve warmed up to GIMP, which has largely replaced Krita for my (very light) graphic editing needs. At FSOSS, I learned about ingimp, which allows you to opt-in to collect and aggregate detailed statistics on how real people use GIMP.
- GNOME Do, a Quicksilver-inspired launcher++.
- mplayer, specifically the version provided by the awesome debian-multimedia.org.
On the command line side, I now use urxvt, screen, ZSH, and these configuration files. If you use the command line more than once a day and haven’t learned about screen yet, you’re missing out. I still use SSH heavily, in too many ways to count. If you use SSH and haven’t learned about SSH keys and SSH tunneling yet, you’re really missing out. Also: sshfs, rsync and SSH, SSH VPN, &c. (Note: most of these work on Mac OS X too, and Windows with cygwin or PuTTY.)
I still use rsync for backups to my NAS, even though I have two Drobo enclosures that I manage with drobo-utils. RAID is not a backup solution, and ZFS on Linux isn’t quite there yet.
Things I don’t use anymore:
- A desktop email client. As mentioned above, I use Gmail (on my own domain, so I keep my email address).
- OpenOffice.org, or any other desktop office suite. I use Google Docs, which exports to Open Document format. I keep studious local backups in ODF/ODS/etc.
- VLC. There is very little that mplayer can’t handle.
- Democracy Player. Ze frank doesn’t post daily anymore, and I don’t particularly follow other video podcasts.
- KMyMoney. It’s good, but I fell behind in organizing my finances and it got left on the wayside.
- EasyUbuntu (now Medibuntu). Debian-multimedia.org satisfies all my illicit patent-encumbered needs.
- Beagle. GNOME Do is more than enough for my local search needs.
- Konsole. RXVT-Unicode instead.
- AllTray.
- Brightside.
I also no longer use the ratpoison window manager. I’ve settled on XFCE instead, with the PCMan file manager. I encourage every Linux user to try an alternate window manager for at least a month. Find one that fits your brain and customize the hell out of it.