Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) was the first and last desktop Linux I had used on a daily basis. I was 14 back then.
I started learning to code in junior high. The teachers in charge of the computer labs were generous enough to have reserved a surplus desktop tower for my exclusive use. She suggested,
“Your solutions [to coding exercise problems] will be evaluated on Linux anyway, so you may as well install Linux while you are at it.”
They already knew that I had been building custom Windows PE images since 6th grade, so it wasn’t a challenge to me. That said though, apart from seeing my dad using Red Hat Linux when I was in primary school, I had no experience with Linux prior to this. The Linux land remained mostly a mystery to me for the 8 years to come.
The school finished constructing a new library building when I started my ninth grade. I began volunteering there as a librarian till my graduation 4 years later. Sitting around the library were a handful of desktop PCs, and I was tasked with setting them up as digital kiosks, allowing nothing but browsing the catalogue.
Knowing nothing about “kiosk mode” or “enterprise management” at that time, I decided to install the most obscure operating system I’ve ever tried, so I installed Ubuntu. (Cue the laugh track.) I put Firefox on auto-startup, in full-screen, and set its landing page to the catalogue website.
“That should be enough to confine guest users to the intranet,” I thought.
Boy, how I had underestimated the mischievous cleverness of my fellow schoolers! Driven by their desire to play Flash games like the Line Rider, it didn’t take them more than a minute to bring up the address bar.
That’s around the time when the major redesign of GNOME 3 (and Unity) happened (why though?). I was among those Linux noobs who got deterred away by this aggressive move and quitted using Ubuntu.
Most of my disappointment was around the panel layout. I don’t like my screen having only a top panel and nothing on the bottom. For some reason, it looks unstable to me, as if — in the unlikely incident where the panel would fall off from the top edge — nothing would be able to catch it from below. (macOS never give me this uneasy feeling due to its Dock on the bottom edge.) On Ubuntu, Only since 16.04 was it possible to move the sidebar to the bottom. Alas, that arrived too late to resurrect my interest.
Becoming a typical Apple fanboy
Later in senior high (2012), I turned my home PC — sporting a Pentium E5700 — into a Hackintosh. I loved how I can enjoy a polished UI+UX while still code in a Unix-like environment: Sublime Text felt way better than Notepad++ or IDLE on Windows, and Notational Velocity was the best plain-text note-taking app I could find. I’ve been daily-driving macOS since then.
(A fork of Notational Velocity, nvALT, was featured in my review of note-taking apps I’ve used from the age 9 to 27.)
That is until I started college and brought with me a ThinkPad X61, which was a hand-me-down from my father. This particular model wasn’t very Hackintosh-friendly, so I tried to mimic the macOS experience with elementary OS. It didn’t do the job: Maybe it was my ancient laptop being too feeble to run “modern” distros; maybe it was the first few releases of elementary OS being too buggy; or maybe it was the lack of good alternative apps on Linux for macOS software that I enjoyed.
As is typical of a spoiled only child, I asked my parents to buy me a MacBook. My dad contended that I didn’t need one for the freshman year, because I wasn’t in computer science or software engineering. (Well, he had a point.) With that rejected, I had to return to Windows 8 for the good half of the year.
To readers with a keen eye, it should have been apparent that my father is a huge ThinkPad fan. At its height, he had half a dozen ThinkPads in his study room — R50e, T43, T60, X60s, X61s, X240, and X1 Carbon (2012). He’s one of those enthusiasts vividly described in Eric Murphy’s video, How ThinkPads Became The Internet’s Favorite Laptop, the kind of person who would follow ThinkPads like a cult. I wouldn’t be surprised if he secretly had a high-karma Reddit account in r/thinkpad.
Back to my story. Lucky enough, with a merit scholarship I received the next year, I was able to afford my first MacBook (a mid-2013 13″ MacBook Air). Then I never looked back and kept using MacBooks one after another.
In retrospect, my MacBook fandom was incidental. On a particularly unlucky day in 2016, the cap on a bottle of Simply Orange went loose in my backpack. The bag was so watertight that 200ml of juice soaked through my MacBook Air for a good afternoon. (This message is NOT sponsored by Herschel City Backpacks.) With an assignment due soon, I had to switch to a MacBook (2015) in a hurry. Amazingly, it was extremely portable and reliable, so much so that I used it for 5 years straight.
Becoming fluent in Linux, but only on TUI
Fast forwarding to grad school (2017~2019). Majoring in data science and holding two research assistant positions (talking about FOMO), I was getting exposed to Linux heavily for study and work. I had SSH access to many unix-like servers (which I briefly enumerated in a previous post, From Ansible to NixOS), but my experience with graphical shells was brief.
Most of my hands-on experience around that time with graphical Linux was at a friend’s place. For our side project that involved machine learning, he had built a tower PC with a beefy GPU. Since a trio of us shared that rig, I didn’t get to tweak its look and feel.
The only Linux-running computer I owned was a Raspberry Pi. With a USB hard drive plugged in, it served as a Time Machine backup destination. The operating system, still called “Raspbian” back then, came with their customized LXDE known as PIXEL. Its layout looked just like Windows <=7, only with the taskbar moved to the top edge of the screen. As aforementioned, the first thing I did after installing the OS was to move the panel to the bottom:
Around the same time, I had a taste of KDE on Gentoo Linux in the computer labs on campus. KDE Plasma soon gained my trust for two reasons:
- It has a traditional, panel-on-the-bottom layout that I’m already familiar with.
- It is very customizable compared to GNOME. Higher customizability translates to lower probability of me having to find another DE as I find out about looks and feels that I didn’t like.
It has since then become my go-to desktop environment whenever I needed one. Starting with an Optiplex 9010 All-In-One at the department I part-timed at (2018) and most recently with a Xeon workstation at work (2022), I had always been preferring KDE. It even run on my M2 MacBook Pro (with Asahi Linux).
But I never had to daily drive a Linux with GUI.
Another taste of Ubuntu
Last week, I installed Linux on a friend’s laptop. Before we dive into the configurations, let’s first recognize her particular use case:
- She is completing her master’s program in data science. This means she 1) is comfortable with the terminal and 2) has a need of learning Linux.
- She had previously used Ubuntu for a year, when she worked as a product manager in a tech startup that issued her an Ubuntu-powered laptop.
- Her laptop is a fairly new Lenovo (product page here, in Chinese), albeit not a ThinkPad. It has a CPU of AMD Ryzen 7 6800HS (Creator Edition), 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM running at 6400MHz, a 512GB NVMe SSD, and WiFi6 onboard.
- Most importantly: we are on really good terms, so she wouldn’t hate me if I messed her rig up.
With that context in mind, let’s walk through the tweaks I made.
Visual lift-ups
I wanted to impress the lady with how pretty Linux could be — which really shouldn’t be your next pickup line — with minimal effort, so I started out with elementary OS. Everything was fine until I wanted to have the wallpaper auto-changed with Damask. It seems that Damask doesn’t yet support Pantheon, the DE of elementary OS.
I decided to install Ubuntu for (though not my) daily use, again, after 15 years.
My friend had approved the looks of elementary OS, so I started with replicating its layout in Ubuntu. That mostly involved these things:
- moving the Dock to the bottom (of course),
- switching the fonts from Ubuntu Sans to Source Sans (though elementary OS uses Inter font family),
- making the top bar transparent with an GNOME Shell Extension, and
- adding an Apps Menu to the top panel.
While I was on the GNOME Extension Manager, I also tried to recreate parts of the macOS experience that I enjoy:
- Installing Caffeine, a quick toggle to prevent your computer from falling asleep. It works just like its macOS counterpart, also named Caffeine, but felt much more like a built-in feature in GNOME.
- Installing Compiz alike magic lamp effect. This is just like the Genie Effect that you can find in macOS Dock preferences, which I thought it would be fun to see on Linux.
- Disabling Ubuntu Dock and installing Dash to Dock. I prefer the latter mainly because I want to put the Activities button on the left end, where the Start button on Windows is located.
- Installing GSConnect, a re-implementation of KDE Connect for GNOME. It allows my friend to send clipboard content between her iPhone and this Ubuntu laptop, along with many other things. Of course, it would not be as seamless as the Handoff features enjoyed by macOS + iOS users, requiring a couple of more taps on her phone. That being said, it’s definitely better than having nothing.
A final extension I installed was a network speed monitor. From Florian Gilles’s NetSpeedMonitor on Windows to Serhiy Mytrovtsiy’s stats on macOS, I’ve always had one in my taskbar/menubar. Here’s my configuration to this handy extension:
The last visual touch-up was to configure Damask. I had it search for wallpapers on Unsplash with the keywords “muted” and “simple”, refreshing hourly:
After all these customizations, we ended up with a minimalist, focused desktop look:
Shopping for apps
Now it’s time to get some software for work and play.
This section would have been much longer if the website Apps for GNOME didn’t exist. In case you didn’t know, it is a curation of Linux applications that adhere to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). This means they look and feel consistent to the whole desktop experience. I genuinely picked most of her software from this list.
Missing from the Apps for GNOME list was an office suite. I would have sticked with LibreOffice, but I didn’t know it had a Ribbon-style interface (termed “NotebookBar”) and wanted my friend to have minimal pain transiting from Microsoft Office, so I chose to install WPS Office instead. In hindsight, I think I made a blunder there.
One application that I didn’t take from the Apps for GNOME list was the System Monitor. In place of it, I installed Resources. It has a layout similar to the Task Manager on Windows. If you want to get even closer to Task Manager, try Mission Center instead.
GNOME looks like macOS as KDE looks like Windows
Speaking of resemblance to other platforms, it surprised me how many GNOME applications resembled stock apps on macOS. This is especially intriguing when you consider the liberty that those Linux developers could have squandered in designing the interface. To name a few:
- Clocks on GNOME has the same “world, alarms, stopwatch, timer” layout as the Clock app on my MacBook.
- Planify features quick-access buttons in the top-left corner just like Reminders on a Mac does.
- Even the Weather utility reminds me of the “hourly conditions” carousel that I see on my Apple Weather app.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not accusing the Linux side to be plagiarizing or lack imagination; I meant to say that I myself — a long-time Mac user — might as well enjoy daily-driving a GNOME desktop now. This is especially true when we see that some macOS stock apps that have no built-in equivalent on Windows actually have decent GNOME counterparts:
To complete the picture — Where Windows has native alternatives to macOS stock apps, GNOME also does not fall short:
- macOS Stickies v.s. Sticky Notes
- macOS Voice Memos v.s. Sound Recorder
- macOS Maps v.s. GNOME Maps
- macOS Calendar v.s. GNOME Calendar
Epilogue
After 15 years, I finally wanted to use GNOME again. It is not because it had caught up in customizability like that of KDE Plasma, but because it has become friendly to a decade-long macOS user.
I deeply appreciate the effort that Linux developers have put into delivering a consistent look and feel, for consistency is commendable in the open-source world, where few are obliged to adhere. Your works made me optimistic in giving desktop Linux a second chance.
