26
votes
Which OS do you use and how does it look?
Previous threads:
What DE and distro do you use and why?
What's your OS and how does it look?
What does your desktop look like? What tools do you swear by?
I've recently switched to Arch and today, it's finally done! You have no idea how hard it was to even turn it off. So I wanted to make another OS/screenshot thread, especially since it's been quite a long time since the last one, and Tildes population increased inbetween, so we might find something interesting again :-)
What's your OS, what do you love about it and how does it look?
I'm using Void Linux for some years now. Here is how it looks: imgur album
I think that's mostly what i use. I have a lot of shell scripts made by me to integrate some things and tools.
When cmus changes the album that is playing, it shows the cover on the lower right of the screen, if it's the same album it doesn't show anything. The lemonbar at the top is all shell script.
And another one to use ffmpeg to convert my flac files to opus for the smartphone or to mp3 for the car stereo.
I use udevil/devmon to handle usb thumb drives and simple-mtpfs (and curlftpfs) for my Android phone instead of gvfs and i'm using davfs2 to handle my cloud backup including my dotfiles so i don't have to start from zero.
I love the fact that your (Linux equivalent of a) taskbar just kinda blends into the picture, like HUD. Gives it a more cyberpunk aesthetic.
Thanks! I'm not good at these things, but i enjoyed it too. It's mostly the wallpaper and colorscheme that have this effect.
I used the same dotfiles at my job and just changed the fonts and icons to TTF for readability since this screen is smaller and worse: here it is
Hot damn! I used to be not much of a classic text interface user until recently, and now all of this looks absolutely gorgeous.
I was always a cli guy, but sometimes i go back and forth. I was using openbox with thunar for a time, but went back to bspwm + cli apps. I think it's faster and more practical. I just miss the bulk rename tool from thunar, but i did one horrible script using bash that does the job.
Mind sharing your wallpaper, friend?
Here.
I just finished my Arch Linux setup!
I've installed Arch about a week ago, and I've been fixing it since today. But finally, it turns off. It's been a tough week (simple button to change brightness - how hard can it be?), but it works.
I use i3-gaps and polybar, spiced up with i3lock with custom image.
For many years, I used just windows. But than I got fed up with it being sooo slooowwww. So I installed Ubuntu. And it was awesome! The computer was just so fast, just as a new one! And the possibilities! I learned basics of vim in few weeks and I'm really glad I did it. For example I had a c# object declaration (+-200 properties, many of them nested in another objects), and I had to rewrite it in another format, so another programmer could easily script it. What should take at least an hour, took about 10 minutes in vim!
After I saw one of the first rice topics here, I immediately started trying to make my Ubuntu look better. It started with dash to dock and ended with i3-gaps and customized i3bar.
After some time, I wanted to install Arch Linux. For two reasons. The first one, Arch Linux has basically everything in AUR. I got tired of compiling every second package I wanted. And second, Arch Linux has great support and even better Wiki. I never received any support from ubuntu community (well, to be fair, someone on reddit posted his solution to my thread several months after I asked, but that was everything). On the arch, on the other way, people are so helpful, I always got my issue sorted out within a hour or two, and first response never took longer than 20 minutes.
It was tough to setup everything. Volume keys. Brightness keys. Bluetooth (which still cannot connect to my BT headphones). Wifi, parititoning. But in the end, it was worth it. In this one week, I learnt more about Linux than in previous half a year when I was using Ubuntu.
And the best thing is, just as I managed to run compton, everything is so smooth and fast. It feels great to work on Arch Linux. Even steam runs!
Here are screenshots: Transparent terminal and firefox (+i3gaps, polybar)
Lock screen
The only think that still remains is to choose good name for my computer. I used
fukushimaandchernobylon my last two Ubuntu installs, and I want something unique for this one. So far I useartotzka, but I don't really like it and will probably change it (together with the lock screen image) later.dotfiles
I too use Arch Linux. Standard i3; I'm not terribly interested in ricing. Like you, I was attracted by the AUR! But I find gaming on Linux to be "not quite there yet" -- so I have a Windows 10 VM and GPU passthrough setup for gaming. It's surely a lot more annoying than using Windows as a host OS, though.
MacOS. Nice, well-polished desktop experience, unix environment for development and good battery life. Love it. I wish Apple would get on top of hardware experience again, though. My 2015 13" MBP is getting to a point where i would like to upgrade it, but the new line with shallow keyboard and touchbar gimmick doesn't appeal to me at all.
I keep trying linux every year, but things that I consider as must-have basics like hardware video acceleration on the web, "proper" font rendering (okay that one is subjective), per-screen scaling and tear-free display output are still not there out of the box.
I have very little patience for my desktop machine, it's almost like you have to treat managing desktop linux as a hobby to make it work. Maybe once wayland ecosystem becomes stable, I'll finally make the switch. New quad-core Thinkpad would be nice.
I'm waiting for apple to backtrack and give us a thicker pro variant before I upgrade. There's way too many sacrifices they made to make it as thin as possible. Until then the 2014/15 models are what I recommend to people.
That said, I'd love to move back to Linux, I've run Mint and Ubuntu as my main drivers in the past, but it's always the software that keeps me within the apple ecosystem. Fact of the matter is, most good devs develop on Macs, so you tend to get the best software versions with apple's laptops.
iTerm in particular is unbeatable, in my opinion. Easy tiling, broadcast input, tmux integration are features I use almost every day.
Linux Mint 19 w/ Cinnamon desktop
I absolutely love it, and if I can get my Vive working with it, that'll give me one less reason to ever have to boot into the Windows 10 partition that takes up the other half of my hard drive (used solely for games, VR, and if I ever want to rent an HD movie on Amazon Prime since it won't let me spend money on HD when booted into Linux, which sucks).
The only way Amazon knows your OS is through your browser User Agent, which can easily be changed. I had a streaming site that wouldn't let me stream at all on Linux, I just downloaded a firefox addon that made my user agent string look like Windows and everything worked.
I think it depends. The DRM some websites uses makes you install a plugin and they have access to that info. I think this is the reason no linux user can play Netflix in full hd (don't know if this is still true).
Yep, it's the DRM. I have to use Chrome to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime (FIrefox used to work but something broke awhile back).
The funny thing is that I can't order for-pay movies in Prime, which is just silly. They'll let me play videos in Linux but not throw money at them. Hence the term "bonkers".
Weird.
Netflix works fine on Firefox here on my Linux machine.
Yeah, my Firefox DRM video just doesn't want to cooperate anymore. It's weird. Used to work fine.
I'm using Win10 LTSC. Pick a wallpaper, and that's what it looks like on first try. I hide the desktop (not the icons: apparently, the software hides the folder that is Desktop) and the taskbar as far into the abyss as possible, mostly to maximize the effective/aesthetic space. Small taskbar icons, StartIsBack++'s "center the icons" perks, T-Clock Redux... Basically: https://i.imgur.com/sflrXxf.jpg
I wanted to use a Linux distro. I've tried installing elementary OS, Apricity, maybe even Ubuntu. No avail: this laptop can't process the fact that it has a foreign (non-MS) OS installed on its drives. It just doesn't load.
So, I'm stuck with Win10. At least it's LTSC now, so I don't have to deal with the majority of Win10's bullshit. LTSC, and some "silence W10 bullshit" software.
Linux can be twitchy on laptops still, which is unfortunate. I had an MSI laptop that was similar and refused to properly run Linux. Now I have a System 76 Oryx Pro (as a secondary system), but haven't figured out how to stretch the battery life beyond a few short hours yet. :(
My primary system is a desktop and Linux Mint is my primary OS on that one (dual-booting Windows 10 for games/VR). Runs beautifully.
I run Debian testing with Gnome Shell. Terminal preference is tildes, brower Firefox. Desktop looks like this. Fairly default Gnome-dark, some slightly nice icons, photo of mine as background. Files everywhere because I'm just starting a new project and haven't got organised yet. Before anyone makes any pointed comments, MFM stands for Micro Foundry Manual, not anything else. :) I can't be bothered with spending hours customising my machine these days. It's nice to know I can if I want to though.
Everything worked out the box, I think. I had to remap a key I didn't like (PrtSc to right-alt) but Debian almost entirely Just Works these days. Oh I had an entropy problem causing a very slow login which was a bugger to diagnose but eventually I nailed it down. I've tried Arch a few times and it's OK but I've been using Debian so long it's just second nature to me now.
I run Debian Testing with i3 desktop, fairly simple setup. I can't add a screenshot because trying to deal with a failing hard drive and working on it on the virtual console. But it is i3 with one white bar at the bottom, simple i3status with load, battery, wifi and time info. The colours are mostly black and gray on white. I like light backgrounds. Don't have a wallpaper b/c almost never see it anyways.
My i3 key setup is quite deviant, inspired by Emacs. I use F-keys and Super exclusively for window management. The tabbed / stacked layouts are quite handy. Most of the time tho I have Emacs on the first desktop and Firefox on the second, and that is it. One fun bit is that because I use shells in emacs and don't open a terminal emulator often, I bound $mod+Return to "emacsclient -c" which opens a new client frame.
I started getting print_req_errors and io_errors yesterday from my backups partition, so now I am making a backup to an USB. I will have to get a fresh harddisk I guess.
Edit: Now that I can mount my FS rw again, here is a screenshot: https://gkayaalp.com/img/scr3.png
Glad you like it!
I have tried almost anything under the sun. i3 is better than xmonad, stumpwm and dwm---IMHO---because it is easy to configure it for the general case, but when you need more than that, it has ways to do that too, and the two are clearly separated. Needing to learn Haskell,
StumpWM(edit: I meant...) Common Lisp and C respectively just to configure your window manager is an overkill. I still haven't needed to usei3-msgAPI, and the declarative config still cuts it for me, so I can ignore the API. With those others, you can't ignore the advanced API.I recently switched my home computer from Ubuntu to NixOS. I have to say that I really like the idea of having a single authoritative declarative description of my system, and being able to atomically switch to a new configuration. There are some things that might take a while getting used to, but all in all I’m really impressed by it.
I Considered trying GuixSD instead of NixOS, but it felt like NixOS is more mature at the moment.
I’ve been a macOS user for about 14 years now. I use a heavy mix of GUI and CLI apps.
I use various quality-of-life enhancers such as:
Alfred (a spiritual successor to Quicksilver)
Hammerspoon (allows for tweaking/automating things with Lua scripting)
Shortcat (allows more keyboard centric use of most apps by leveraging macOS accessibility APIs)
Textmate 2 (my GUI text editor of choice)
Screenshots
i have been using archlinux for a close to a decade (!!!) now on all the machines that i have, from a desktop machine, to a laptop, to an arm device (for tinkering). my window-manager of choice (don't use a DE, most of them are generally too bloated for my needs) is fvwm2 :) which i have been using for as long as a i can remember, and heavily customized.
looks something like this a couple of points about the what you see here:
on the top-left side you would see a 3x3 grid (pages), that is the fvwm-desktop. i can place windows in any of them. and you can have as many desktops as you want. most of the pages/desktop navigation happens via keyboard. this also includes window movement to different pages/desktops, window-resize (via 'ctrl-,') etc. etc.
inside each page, there are couple of rectangular icons which kind of show the outline of the window. putting the mouse on any of the icons, shows what exactly it refers to.
on the left margin (below the desktop) you would see a bunch of thumbnails/icons, these are the icons of applications that have been minimized. thumbnails are generated on the fly, capturing current window snapshot. when i move mouse over them i get a cool highlighting effect as well.
another slightly (?) idiosyncratic aspect of the setup is the window title-bar which is placed horizontally rather than the canonical vertical placement. i figured, that vertical-monitor-real-estate is more precious than horizontal (monitors are getting wide-screen, in default disposition), and decided to go with this. on the title-bar the minimize/maximize/close/menu bitmaps were created by me, and seems to suit it just fine...
Screenshot (over two monitors)
This is Ubuntu 18.04 – visible in the screenshot are i3, i3bar, i3status-rust, and alacritty. I've also written an applet (the Nvidia icon in the tray) to control my discrete GPU, and a couple of custom blocks for i3status-rust (the
(unmetered?)is an indicator of whether NetworkManager thinks the current network is metered or not, the image icon is clickable to start and stop the compositor, and the text between the clock and calendar usually displays the current week of term). The wallpaper is a reward from the Myst 25th anniversary Kickstarter.My dotfiles are available, though infrequently updated. I also have a repository of random scripts to do things like lock the screen, start a compositor, and so on.
That looks great! Did you have any special reason to use alacritty instead of something more popular, such as terminator? It's the first time I see this.
I used to use gnome-terminal, but I was frustrated that it takes so long to start up; alacritty opens marginally faster, and there's an issue open about how it can be made even quicker. It's also written in Rust, so compiling it is super easy.
It doesn't have emoji support, though, so if terminator supports emoji then I'd definitely consider switching!
I use Windows 10 pro. It is basically a default install, especially because I reinstalled recently. I keep it mostly normal anyway. I really like many Linux distros, but none work for my current setup and wants (mostly Nvidia driver issues). Also, I just bought an oculus rift, and I think Linux and vr gaming doesn't really work currently.
Which is bonkers considering the number of devs on Linux. I'm going to try (again) to get my vive running on Linux Mint, but I'm not hopeful.
Are there many? Do they specifically develop their stuff inside a Linux?
I have an easy time wrapping my head around using Linux generally, and switching to the required platforms for developing and/or testing. Developing on Linux never crossed my mind. Are there even tools?
Linux is the development environment. It has all the tools.
You might be right. I don't know much about the tools ecosystem the Linux distros support.
One of the reasons I can't switch to Linux even if I wanted to is that not all apps I use are available there. If I can't use any and I don't have a almost-exact replacement, it's a dealbreaker. Which is a shame, 'cause I know Linux is all about hackability. I just can't hack it well enough. :(
This is why I dual-boot! There's still the occasional program I have to use Windows for (also games + VR), but practically everything else I can use Linux for.
Which apps are keeping you glued to windows these days?
Do you think dual-booting is better than using a VM? Is there a big performance difference between those?
Indigrid, a minimalist outliner. I keep half of my data – including of creative projects – there. There isn't a Linux version, and I don't think I'd seen anything like it elsewhere. There are note-taking apps of all sorts, but none is it.
AIMP the audio player. Again, I know there are audio players out of wazoo on any platform already, but this one's perfect for me. I listen to a lot of music, and when I do, I want to keep the comfort of it. AIMP is simple, quick, and generously-modifiable.
PotPlayer the video player. Same as above. In fact, I've just checked the AlternativeTo list for Linux, and they all look... unpolished, which is something that I can't help but give a lot of shit about.
Maybe as many that I can't recall right now.
I don't think that's true. I know it's popular with developers, but virtually all the developers I know use either OSX or windows.
They may use linux VMs for developing against an environment close to prod, but linux is still kind of difficult to support as workstations for most large companies.
Android Q Beta 1 on my OG Pixel. Battery is probably ready to be replaced, but other than that, no real complaints considering I got it pre-owned, had it two years, and it still has the latest version of Android available. Also, system wide dark mode is sick, and I cannot wait until I can filter out URLs from Chrome on the device without root.
Is it worth while to switch to the android Q beta? It's the first time I hear about it, but I have the same phone and was thinking it might be cool to try something different.
If you like all Dark Mode, and are willing to deal with some weird finagling on your phone, go for it. There isn't that much here right now compared to Pie, aside from that and messing up some icons, but that may change in future betas.
Dark mode sounds really nice, but I think I'll wait for it to stabilise.
There's quite a bit if you're willing to run some commands.
XDA has found quite a bit of hidden changes.
I'm using a Windows 7 and NixOS dual boot right now. I don't have any screenshots to share because I just switched over from Arch and am still setting it up. I'm currently struggling to get ROCm installed with my hardware.
I use Arch Linux with the sway window manager and it looks like this.
I think I'm happy with this setup - it's productive and stable. I flirt with the idea of trying Void or even a BSD but I think Arch is probably the sweet spot of providing a minimal and efficient *nix experience without being hard to get stuff done on.
I recommend sway to anyone interested in tiling window managers. It's elegant, efficient, and represents the future direction of the Linux graphical shell.
I am running a slightly modified version of MX Linux (Based on Debian)
Screenshot
Love the overlay with the big clock.
Thanks! I am using a program called Conky to run it. I did not create the design, but I am happy to give you the config file if you are interested
Appreciate the offer, but I would have no use for it, since it would be confined to Linux, would it not?
True. If you ever decide to try it, the conky theme is one of the defaults in MX Linux
I've used Linux on one or more computers for the better part of a decade, and I'm working on getting a majority of my computing time in Linux. Most of that time was spent on Arch, and I've dabbled with seriously using Debian (it's my choice for a stable distro, at least). If I posted my Debian setup, it would be the same, but probably vanilla i3 or MATE from backports. I've also used i3 off and on after I first found wmii (and was really into using DWM, and kinda dug wmii), but then wmii stopped being developed.
Here's my current setup, with some free Arch/Arc wallpapers I did in GIMP in like ten minutes. It's just a basic i3-gaps setup on my gaming rig with my crappy Doom launcher project opened to help show the terminal colors (I copy/pasted the Nord colors with the Arc background color, nice pastel look I always like). I installed ranger just in case I need a file manager, but I tend to find the shell faster for many file operations.
not a lot has changed since my old post, but I did start using ubersicht with chunkwm with a toggle to hide the menu bar in MacOS using Alfred.
The newer kernels have had better Chromebook support, so I've started shopping around a bit.
MacOS
Windows 10 LTSB
Chromebook with Gallium
Right now I'm using macOS! I love it's design, and general cleanness. Wanted to upgrade to 14.5 beta 5, but it's not that interesting.
I was a mac fanatic for over 16 years, but in the past several years Apple has really been dropping the ball. I still miss a lot of OS X and I wish they'd just port xcode to Linux. I've heard a lot of complaints about xcode for mobile dev but I thought it was great for working with C++.
The last straw was when Apple dropped native Vulkan support (after being on the advisory board). We were this close to getting actual widespread games support on Mac and Apple veered away at the last second. That was when I built my first system by hand in nearly 20 years and went back to dual-booting Linux and Windows.
Mac's general freedom of space – what you called "general cleanness" – is appealing to me, as well. I'm trying to make do with my own resources (Win10 + additional software), mostly because the screen is so tiny I need the space just to breathe mentally. (If I ever switch to a desktop, two 16:9 displays are going to be a must. ALL DA POWAH!!)
So far, I'd removed or tucked in as many icons as I can (and my desktop essentially disappears on command), cut out all of the fancy parts of VS Code, made the things factory-defualt-small in as many places as I can... Doing alright so far.
Manjaro Linux. I was intrigued by rolling release OS. It's a pretty vanilla install.
There's not really "vanilla" Manjaro. Which desktop did you go with?
Win10 because l can't really use Linux. It's not my favorite but l don't like linux or MacOS either so l'll stick with this.
Dual monitors, desktop icons hidden, extreme mess of New Folder (26) and the lot because l keep forgetting to clean up. :/
I do have a small old NAS webserver thing that runs some custom linux distro; no idea what it exactly is but l gave myself root access so it's customizable now. I use that to learn linux/ssh/terminal stuff, and to host a personal info wiki.
Dual booting Windows 7 for games and Linux Mint with i3 for basically everything else. Some people might say Mint is a strange choice, but it just works for me so why change it?
I use Fedora both at home and at work with a 3-monitor setup at work.
Right, now I am using Nixos with I3 and I3status-rust. It is functional and pretty. I had to stop ricing because I would spend all day tweaking it.
I'm running Chrome OS M75 (Canary).
Pretty basic in terms of appearance, no widgets or such. Just my taskbar and a wallpaper.
Besides that I use the official Honeysuckle theme. Which makes my browser a pretty pink.
I use Fedora Workstation primarily with GNOME. I don't do much at all with the interface outside of defaults.
I like Fedora because it has relatively up-to-date software all throughout a release's cycle, and keeps a vanilla GNOME experience. SELinux is also pretty nice.
I like GNOME because it has the best HiDPI support, most of the apps I use are GTK and theme nicely, generally works well with default settings, and basically just works.
LXDE and Xfce are a no-go for HiDPI. Plasma 5 for me doesn't scale right if I use the AMDGPU xorg driver (works fine with modesetting). Aside from that, Plasma 5 works fine, but I have no real reason to switch to it since GNOME still works great for me.
i use chrome os