Year of the Linux Desktop 2021

postrecord — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 00:37:24 +0000

This year is the year of the Linux desktop... again.

Linux is not a complete operating system like Windows, Mac or BSD Unix. They take the different free software packages and put them together with the Linux kernel, this is called a Linux distribution.

Picking a Linux distribution is hard. Besides many choices, you have to pick the right one for your needs. Do you need high performance or security?

There are so many different Linux distributions.

For getting work done, people usual use Ubuntu, OpenSuse or Fedora. Their packages are quite up to date and they are stable. But that doesn't mean they're secure by default.

Ubuntu uses snap and apt packages at the same time, I don't like that. OpenSuse doesn't use the deb package management system but zypper and rpm. So you would go

sudo zypper install package

Instead of the Debian way

sudo apt install package

I don't trust Fedora, because Red Hat pulled the plug out of CentOS. Who's to say they don't do the same with Fedora?

Distros and forks

There are only a handful core distributions. Most Linux distributions are fork of distributions. There are many of them.

As the Debian folks would call it a frankenlinux. Some of them are gone overnight or don't have long term support. That's why it wise to pick one that has long support.

Debian, Slackware and RedHat have been around since 1993. RedHat is orientated to servers.

Personal use

Switching operating systems. I like to use Debian based systems, because it has a really large user base. So if you run into a problem, you can quickly find a solution.

I don't have time for Gentoo, Arch etc.. work to do. It should just work. One issue I have with Debian is that the packages are outdated, but I found you can install Kali Linux on the desktop (Debian + rolling release + some security tools). Perfect for my use case.

Development on Linux

You can do most of your programming on Linux, depends on what field you are working on. You can use C, C++, Python, Go all the web dev stuff like vue and a lot more.

In fact most of the times it's one single command to install it, while on Windows or Mac you have to struggle a bit. Something like Go is a one line install. Linux really is the programmers OS.

As IDE you can use any of the JetBrains stuff, Sublime (if you must), Visual Studio Code or vim (perfection).

Why use virtual environments?

postrecord — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 20:31:06 +0000

A virtual environment (venv) in Python is isolated from the rest of the system. This is necessary, because packages can conflict and sometimes packages are malicious.

First install the program virtualenv

sudo apt install virtualenv

Then you can create a new project (hello):

virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 hello  
cd hello
source bin/activate

On my machine:

C:\home\frank\example> ls
hello
C:\home\frank\example> cd hello 
C:\home\frank\example\hello> ls
bin  lib  pyvenv.cfg
C:\home\frank\example\hello> source bin/activate        
(hello) C:\home\frank\example\hello> ls             
bin  lib  pyvenv.cfg
(hello) C:\home\frank\example\hello>

Then you can add any Python files you want. Install modules with pip, they will exist only in this virtual environment.

This prevents package conflicts. You can even set a custom Python version. Added bonus: Even if the module contains malware, it won't affect your operating system.

To exit your virtual environment, just type exit.

(hello) C:\home\frank\example\hello> exit

Automatic venv

If you use an IDE, then the IDE will create the virtual environments for you. For beginners, that's the recommended way.

In PyCharm for example, you don't have to do anything except create a new project or open an existing project. It takes care of everything for you.

I'm not 100% sure what other Python IDE's do in terms of the virtual environment, but I'm quite sure they set it up too.