Ubuntu

I've pretty much moved entirely into Ubuntu, and am pretty happy with what I've found. Its a got a very active community; I've found pre-build packages for just about all the applications I tend to use, though I've had to grab a few from Debian Unstable. For the most part, Ubuntu does a great job at Just Working™. It doesn't change dramatically too, so I don't have to worry about config files breaking, or having to put up with lots of updates every so often. Now granted this means I'll run some "outdated" software, but that doesn't bother me quite as much as it used to. April doesn't seem to far away, though we'll see how long I can go without trying out a dist-upgrade on my laptop. So it seems Ubuntu should be here to stay for a while. You'll be seeing my Ubuntu-ish screenshots on the right here for a while, until I tire of the Ubuntu branding.
Just looked over some older posts of mine and found this jem from Great day for Linux on the desktop: "Ubuntu [is] polished, but I don't think I could ever use it. I need more control over my system than distros like Ubuntu and Fedora provide. I'm too used to just editing text files I think." How ironic. A few months later, I want a distribution that can allow me to not hand-edit text files and such. Oh well. I like Ubuntu, and how it allows me to get beyond my OS. Hopefully I'll get around to writing that mythical article about art.gnome.org, updating some icon themes for art.gnome.org, writing more code on my projects (most recently my checkbook application and my proof-of-concept GNOME image viewer with Andrew. So much to do, and too much work to deal with instead... isn't life great?

Linux woes

I've started to become unsatisfied with my Linux desktop again. So this time I really thought about it. And I came up with this matrix. I compare some of the distros I'd consider using, and features I look for in my desktop. The first distro I'm going to try is Ubuntu. It seems the most polished, even though its pretty patched. I'm looking for a distro that will allow me to focus less on packages, and making packages. I want to try to start focusing more on actual application development, rather than distribution development. Hence why I'm considering Debian. Ubuntu seems to be a more polished, GNOME-ified Debian distribution. Gentoo, Slackware and Fedora are 99% out of the question. Gentoo is too tough to maintain. Too much compiling, etc-updating, and such. Slackware has no real package manager, and entirely too much hand-editing of config files. And Fedora, is well, so kludgy its not usable.
And so we're down to three: Arch Linux (my tried and true buddy), Ubuntu and Debian. My problems with Arch Linux are: no enough packages. I find myself making packages for many applications that have been around for a while. I know that I if I stick it out, I can help add to the package count, but, as I said earlier, I want to transition away from distro development and move more towards application development. And second, with Arch Linux, I find myself doing a lot of hand-editing of config files. And I'm growing tired of paying that much attention to my OS. I want things to work a bit more automated. And so I am trying Ubuntu. Next I'll try Debian (in a few weeks) and see where I stand from there. I may go back to Arch Linux, and I may not. Not that my blog gets syndicated on any planets anyway, so none of those users will know. And this is it for me supporting distros. I'm too much of a flipflop (thank you George); I keep changing distributions. So we'll see how Ubuntu goes. Cheers.

Monty Python, political commentator

The best song in the Universe. A bit of background on this wonderful song can be found at Wikipedia. Eric Idle sums up my feelings about the US government perfectly. Thanks to Stu for showing this to me.
"So fuck you very much dear Mr. Bush"

Up late, can't sleep

I can't seem to fall asleep. Even though I'm tired, and know I'll be exhausted in the morning. I can't seem to fall asleep at night. So instead I decided to explore Coaster. And I must say, its a very impressive application. The UI is simple, yet very usable, and it fills the niche for burning software that's between nautilus-cd-burner (way to simple for some people), and xcdroast (way to complex for most people). I have managed to get by using nautilus-cd-burner for most of my burning needs (I burn mostly ISOs, and not much else).
For a 0.1.x release this seems surprisingly stable and usable, though as we all know Coaster's been a long time in the making. I look forward to watching it mature into The GNOME Burning Suite.

Four more years of bumper stickers

Along those same lines as the Ben Franklin quote, I think I'm going to be purchasing this bumper sticker:



The thumbnail image sucks, but its a pretty funny message. Check out the rest of the bumper stickers from the Irregular Times Store.

Essential liberties

I saw this quote on a bumper sticker and found it particularly profound:

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.