Despite my lack of posts, my Year Of Linux on the Desktop project isn’t dead, it’s just mutated a bit. But it’s also taken a somewhat unexpected turn.

One of the ideas I’d explored for a Linux desktop was a small form factor PC, and once I started looking at small form factor PCs I started wondering how practical/expensive it would be to get one I could use for a bit of light gaming.

And once I’d got the idea of a bit of gaming, one thing led to another and a couple of weeks ago I essentially impulse purchased an OLED Steam Deck.

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Welcome to the March list of stuff I’ve found around the Internet and enjoyed reading (maybe not enjoyed, as such, but you know what I mean). The plan is to do occasional similar posts as I stumble across worthy reads, but how many links per post, and how often, are yet to be determined.

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Checking back, it’s almost exactly a year since I last posted my desk setup, and it has actually changed quite a lot in the last year. The computer has changed, the monitor has changed, the keyboard has changed – pretty much everything except the desk itself, and the desk mat, have changed.

The current overall objective here is to keep the desk as clean as possible, whilst still being usable, and I think I’m getting pretty close to that ideal now.

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In my previous job I spent a lot of time analysing political donations for Australian federal elections (don’t ask). To make my life easier I create an R package that scraped all of the data from the Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC) Transparency Register.

For the last couple of years this package has been sitting dormant in a private git repo, but I was sufficiently motivated this year to dust it off and make it public.¹

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As part of my project of moving away from Apple services I’ve been setting up my own music server, using Jellyfin.

I’ve been collecting music since before CDs were a thing.¹ I had an enormous CD collection but at some point in the last decade or two I decided that I didn’t have any room for storing physical media any more and ripped all of my CDs and DVDs and got rid of them.

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I’ve been living the Linux desktop lifestyle for a couple of months now. Not full time, and not exclusively, but what desktop computing I do I’ve tried to do under Linux (still the ARM Ubuntu desktop running as a virtual machine under UTM on the M2 Pro Mac Mini). And it’s mostly been… fine?

So rather than just complaining, I figured I’d document some solutions I’ve come up with and how they’re working for me.

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Nobody buys a computer; they buy into an ecosystem.

This has been true for (basically) forever. A computer has only ever been as useful as the software you could run on it, and as only a small fraction of the people who have ever owned computers can program them, this mostly means the software you can buy (or otherwise obtain) for it.¹

Computer ecosystems have always evolved. Defender of the Crown and Delux Paint were excellent reasons to buy into the Amiga ecosystem, but WordPerfect was a solid reason for abandoning it.

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In our previous episode I described how I undertook a new adventure in Linux to see whether it was workable for me these days as a desktop operating system.

But if you’ve ever played around with Linux you’ll know that there isn’t one Linux. Linux comes as distributions and different distributions have their own philosophies and included software and desktop environments and default apps. Your own experience of Linux might not be the same as any other persons'.

In this post I’m going to go through some of the options I’ve explored and choices that I’ve made so far.

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In or around 2002 I got my first Mac, a white G3 iBook. Ever since, my main computer has been a Mac.

I’ve certainly not only used Macs since then. My day job has mostly had me using Windows (except for a brief and unsuccessful diversion into academia for a couple of years where I was able to use a Mac), but the computers I have bought myself and have control over have been Macs.¹

In recent years, however, I’ve been beginning the question the stewardship of the Mac by Apple’s current management. Apple just isn’t that into the Mac anymore, and I’m a bit wary of hitching my wagon to a platform that’s always going to play second fiddle (or third, or fifth) to cash cows like the iPhone.

As a result, every now and then I have a look to see how green the grass is on the other side. I’ll load up Linux on a VM or a Raspberry Pi or something and have a play and quickly forget about it. While my objective is usually to see whether Linux is now a viable replacement for macOS for my use, mostly I don’t get that far. Usually I’ll just get distracted by something and move on and back to the Mac.

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Build details:

• Lulu (V1 PCB) in space grey with clear encoders;
• Boba UT4 62g tactile switches;
• KAT Cyberspace keycaps.

The Boardsource Lulu was the board that runied everything for me.

Up until the Lulu I was perfectly happy with normal keyboards. I tended toward the smaller side – my ideal keyboard was probably a nice 60 per cent – but definitely within the realms of the mainstream, as far as keyboards as a hobby goes.

The Lulu started like any other keyboard. Somewhere (probably either Reddit or on GeekHack) a group buy was advertised, and I paid my money and waited a long, long time. Eventually, it arrived and I built it and the rest was history.

The thing with the Lulu is that it was my first split keyboard. Now split keyboards are all I want to use.

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