DEV Community: Pavel Kovar

Less common OSes for desktop - episode 1

Pavel Kovar — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 10:44:32 +0000

I know this is not a topic exactly for this platform, on the other hand, why do not extends our wisdom. I got an idea to test a couple of not common Desktop class operating systems to find if there is some other alternative to let's say big three (Windows, Mac OS, and GNU/Linux). As a daily user of GNU/Linux (currently Elementary OS, but planning to give chance to Manjaro) and Mac OS (on my work laptop) I am pretty happy, but since I have one older spare laptop I told to myself, why do not explore what is outside.

My testing machine HP ProBook 6550b:

Intel Core i5 M450 4x 2.4GHz
GPU ATI Mobility Radeon HD 540v
8 GB RAM
80 GB HDD (no SSD)

GhostBSD

The first episode had to be about GhostBSD (https://www.ghostbsd.org/) which is a BSD system based on the FreeBSD project (https://www.freebsd.org/) which is a more general-purpose operating system mostly used on server applications, with pre-configured desktop and apps. I download an ISO image and put it on a flash drive, but stuck in the boot process where I always end it up with a broken picture. ( Since my plan is to test operating systems from an end-user perspective, I did spend just a couple of minutes trying to figure out the problem without success so testing of GhostBSD failed for me.

NomadBSD

But to give chance to BSD family I tried another desktop-ready system called NomadBSD (https://nomadbsd.org/). This operating system is presented as a live system with a desktop and my understanding was at the beginning that I can also install the system to a hard drive. Unfortunately, after some investigation, I found that is not true. You "install" the system just on a flash drive, but still, I was interested in this system anyway.

So, I loaded the image from the website into my flash drive and boot the system. In this case, the system loads into a graphical interface with the installation wizard. I go through the wizard and in the end, it asked me to reboot the system. Sadly, after reboot, I end up with the same wizard, but this time it failed at the end since the file system was already created.

When I quit the installer I ended up with an empty screen with wallpaper and no panel or dock (as I was on screenshots on the project website). Since it is Openbox window manager, by right click on the mouse I was able to see the application menu, where I can start plank (dock) and tint2 (panel).

Overall, this experience also does not match my expectations. As live image for example some issue, why not but definitely not as a daily desktop OS.

Conslusion

For the firsts episode of my epic testing saga, I have to say, that this was not too happy. Some can argue that I skipped FreeBSD itself, but this is not a desktop-oriented system, rather a general-purpose OS. I tested it in past and with their excellent handbook, I was able to set up the whole desktop-ready experience quite well, but in this saga, I am looking for out-of-the-box systems.

For the next episode, I pick up ReactOS. Stay tuned.

Neverending quest to find an ideal code editor

Pavel Kovar — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 13:50:43 +0000

Every developer knows it. Everyone wants to have an editor which will all features for every situation (like a developer's swiss knife) and ideally does not take a huge amount of memory and CPU while you use it. And this is a neverending quest for me.

I recently reopen this problem in my mind, while I started work on one Kotlin (with Micronaut framework https://micronaut.io/) project. Right from the beginning, I refused to use Idea IntelliJ since in general, I'm not a big fan of full-featured IDEs even Idea have probably the best support for Kotlin language. Till now, I was quite happy with Visual Studio Code, but ...

By default, VS Code does now have support for Kotlin language (even for just syntax highlighting), so I did what I always do in VS Code, install a plugin. And here, a problem occurred. After a couple of minutes, I was surprised that my laptop started to be loud (Apple Macbook Pro with M1 and 8 GB RAM) and the response of the system was terrible. So I started investigating what is going on and from the Activity Monitor application, I found that VS Code gets almost 4 GB of RAM and no small amount of CPU. Honestly, I was angry with VS Code and started to look for alternatives. Nothing really convinced me, so after a couple of hours of browsing the web for "ideal editor", I came back to VS Code and look deeper into what is the problem with my setup.

Luckily, it was just the Kotlin plugin (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fwcd.kotlin). I found a way to check processes inside the VS Code and saw that the Kotlin plugin (which I installed just due to syntax highlighting) takes 2,5 GB of RAM. So I remove it and found another plugin (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mathiasfrohlich.Kotlin) that works fine. Also, I did a review of all plugins which I already installed and found that I do not need now almost any of them.

At the end of this part of my neverending quest, I am staying with VS Code for now. With an almost vanilla configuration and almost no plugins, it gives me all that I need for now. I am not saying it is the end of my search, but I can take a rest for now.

One more thing. I give a quick shot to Vim (NeoVim) with some plugins for Kotlin and folder tree, but I am lazy to learn to use Vim.

Anyway, if you have a good tip for a code editor which is light, yet powerful and ideally free of charge, let me know.

Developer story - path to Python

Pavel Kovar — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 09:15:23 +0000

Somehow, I became a Python developer and I like it.

And now, some context. I started my work career at 19 (I am 33 now) right after I finished technical-oriented middle school (high school) and decided to get some real experiences in the big world (and also make some money). At that time, I already coded a lot of small personal and school projects mostly in Borland Delphi(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software)) and in C (because I was crazy and at that time, it was cool to know this language). In my first job, I actually work mostly as an admin rather than a software developer and that was the reason why I quit after 10 months for a junior developer position in another company.

My first real developer job was about developing desktop apps for internal usage in Borland C++. During 2 years in this role, I also started learning Java since I saw it more and more around me in the community (note: language itself was not that difficult for me but it turns that it was hard for me to understand the whole ecosystem). After 2 years, the company where I worked starts to have troubles connected with salary issues, so I decided to look around for another job. I find an interesting job which was titled as a Java developer. It turns that it will not be directly Java development rather coding in proprietary frameworks and languages based on XML and Java environment to customize a solution for customers (you can imagine as SAP implementations) however, I decided to get this job (at the end, they offer a decent salary for that time and my level of experience).

It turns to be a great decision to take this job for my career. Long story short, I am still with the company. The key benefit of this company was (and still is) for me, that I am surrounded by very experienced developers and wise people which push me gentle forward. I was very happy for long years, but it happened that mood in the company gets bad and I decided to the left company to escape it, but I was told I can return whenever I will want.

I was out of the company for 2 years where I worked in two other places and monitor externally what happening to my original company. The situation changed, grumpy people left the company and it was the right time to get back. It was like a return home.

During these almost 11 years I had the opportunity to work on many different roles (solution engineer, technical lead, support engineer), and in each of these positions, I touched on various projects and technical solutions. Started with proprietary languages, later I work more with Java and Groovy. I was asked to build 2 front-end apps for internal usage (which turns to apps used even by our customers). For those, I picked JS + React. Since I am with the company for so long, I got the opportunity to lead whole implementation projects for our customers which was interesting from a point of soft skills, but after a couple of these projects, I decided to move myself to product development (pure software development) team focused on cloud solutions.

I start worked in this team in January 2021 and right after I started to maintain and write new Python lambda functions. During this, I found that I like coding in Python itself. I met this language before, but I never used it on daily basis and I realized that I like it most of all languages I used before. And that is my story to Python. I can't say that I am a pro at Python, but since we will continue to use it in more solutions, there big chance I will reach high skill later.

Flatpak packages from end-user perspective

Pavel Kovar — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 05:03:20 +0000

In this post, I would like write few words about package format for Linux based operating systems Flatpak, which is from my point of view one of the best thing which was introduced into Linux ecosystem in last few years. I will not go into the technical details of the format itself, rather then I would like to focus on how good is Flatpak in terms of practical usage of end-users.

In almost every Linux distribution, we always have some package manager which we usually use for installation and update software for the particular distribution. Packages are maintained by distribution's developers and historically users rely on packages in the repository of distribution as the only way how to get the software (of course, except you can compile software from source code). The problem which happened to me several times in the past was, that I would like to have the latest major version of my favorite application, but in distribution's repository was the older version. This is exactly the situation that Flatpak solved for me.

Flatpak offers an easy way how to install the latest version of applications on your distribution (in case of that distribution support Flatpak, more https://www.flatpak.org/setup/). Application in Flatpak format doesn't rely on versions of libraries in your current Linux distributions and brings all it needs itself. Updates are handled by the application's creators and not by distribution maintainers, so you are getting all new features when they are developed. This is also less headache for developers because they will pack the application once and it will run on any distribution.

Currently, the easiest way how to find applications in Flatpak format is to look and Flathub(https://flathub.org/home), which is the repository where any developer can publish applications. You can browse applications by category and find there also description and screenshots from applications.

If you want to use Flatpak on your distribution of choice, just install flatpak package and add the Flathub repository. Some distributions have Flatpak support implemented out of the box like Fedora, Linux Mint or Elementary OS.

I can imagine, that a lot of core Linux users (even I'm one of them) can probably find some technical issues or other disadvantages, but I tried to explain Flatpak in positive way to motivate users (especially beginners) to try this and see the benefits. Also, there are other alternatives like Snap or AppImages, but from my personal point of view, Flatpak is currently the best solution how to easily install new applications into my system.