Gnome comes with hardly any customization options. For the vast majority of
users this probably is a good thing. Personally I feel a lot more comfortable
and efficient with a couple of customizations. To work efficiently I need to
keep a vast amount of windows (~100 at peak times) open at the same time and
switch between them with minimal effort.
Here's my current list of Gnome extensions that make using gnome a lot
more tolerable for me. I'm running Gnome 3.38 right now and didn't really look
into Gnome 40 yet.
- AlternateTab -
because trying to switch though grouped windows steals a lot of time and
quite frankly makes me angry. So this is an easy but important UX fix.
- AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem
Support -
IMHO the most important fix all Gnome users need. It adds a status icon
area. Some apps I need to use are only accessible through their status icon.
(nextcloud, nitrokey app, etc.) I've tried a lot of status icon area
extensions over the years. This is the only one which doesn't bug out.
Lucky break.
- Audio
Switcher -
I've got a couple of audio sinks (like external sound cards on my docking
station, various bluetooth devices) This make switching bewteen them
considerably less annoying. It also add a handy microphone volume indicator,
so I can always if my microphone is turned on.
- Current screen only on windows switcher - does exactly what the name sais. This way alt-tab is less confusing for me.
- Frippery Move
Clock - It's just
easier on my eyes, when the clock is not cluttering up the center
of my top bar.
- Impatience -
Extension for scaling down animation durations. I'm trying to get some work
done here. Watching pretty windows fly across the desktop is fun sometimes,
but I'd rather navigate quickly.
- Vitals - So far my
favorite system monitor plugin. It's highly customizable and supports
monitoring really a lot of things. You could use it to pin your secondary
casing fan speed or your wifi chip temperature to gnomes top bar. I've only
pinned the most basic things and still numbers it's tracking are 2 clicks
away at most. It has proven itself very useful to me time and again.
- Workspace
Matrix - I
use a lot of workspaces and prefer a vertical layout. This makes it
feasible.
When browsing files in gnome 3 I occasionally hit the space bar by accident.
Nautilus the file browser of gnome then tries to display a preview. This is
pretty anoying to me for most files already. However when this happens on a
video file, the preview feature is totally bugged. It will open a videoplayer
which can not be closed again, because every time I close the preview window it
will start another one.
It's quite amazing how gnome 3 manages to look good overall, but at the same
time add flaws which make using it a genuine pita.
The file preview feature is shipped in a package calle gnome-sushi and I
usually fixed my UX by just uninstalling it. On a recent Debian 11 install
however removing that package with apt would have also removed gnome
alotogether. So I just uninstalled it without touching any dependencies:
sudo dpkg --purge --force-depends gnome-sushi
Sofar it seems to work as expected. I'm not sure if updates will inflict this
UX scurge upon me once more.
I've been asked several times now how one can get a verified copy of F-Droid. So
here's a simple step by step explanation.
Please note that F-Droid recommends to install privileged extension. It enables
a seamless app installation and update experience. So installing the APK only
makes sense when you can't install F-Droid privileged extension.
Start out by getting F-Droids signing key:
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 802A9799016112346E1FEFF47A029E54DD5DCE7A
Next let's get the apk and signature file:
wget https://f-droid.org/FDroid.apk
wget https://f-droid.org/FDroid.apk.asc
now, lets verify it:
gpg --verify-files FDroid.apk.asc
Great, it's verified now you can use Bluetooth, ADB or whatever to copy/install the APK to your phone.
Of course this is just fetching everything from the internet. So it's essential
to really make sure you've fetched the correct key.
Today I've added a systemd service definition, but it didn't show up as a
service when running systemctl list-units. I took me a while to figure out
how to ask systemd if there's anything wrong with my .service file. The
easiest way to get infos about broken service files I could find is to run:
systemd-analyze verify my.service
If that doesn't work, make sure the file is in the correct path.
(/etc/systemd/system/*.service) Once all typos/bugs/etc. are fixed don't
forget to run systemctl daemon-reload to make sure systemd is aware of the
new unit.
I recently helped setting up a cheap used Lenovo D330-10IGM. I realy like
compact 10 inch notebook table convertibles like this. Too bad such machines
always come with Windows 10 preinstalled. So I of course the first thing I'm
going to do is installing my favourite operating system: Debian. This is quite
a process and in case I'll need to retrace my steps I'm writing them down here:
- Prepare USB Flash-Drive with a Debian Installer
- download debian installer iso, it's easiest to get an unofficial image
with non-free drivers included
(https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/).
I prefer gnome, but it should work fairly similar with most desktop
envirionments.
- connect a big enough usb drive (the debian image i used required ~4GB)
- flash it to a usb drive. eg on a debian system you can just run:
sudo dd if=~/Downloads/debian-live-10.2.0-amd64-gnome+nonfree.iso of=/dev/yourusbdrive bs=8K
- optional tip: once
dd finishes run sync to wait for the OS to write
buffered data to your flash drive
- Lets start by disabling Secure Boot and check that USB boot is enabled:
- make sure your D330 is shut down
- Press
[Volume Up] + [Power] until the backlight comes on. This will bring the machine into UEFI mode.
- click: BIOS Setup
- click: Security (on the left side)
- click: Secure Boot (you want this to be disabled)
- click: Boot (on the left side)
- check that USB Boot is set to enbaled
- click: Save and Exit (lower right)
- click: yes (to save changes)
- Install Debian (gnome):
- make sure your D330 is shut down
- plug your usb previously prepared drive in
- Press
[Volume Up] + [Power] until the backlight comes on. This will bring the machine into UEFI mode.
- click: Boot Menu
- click: Linpus lite (SanDisk) (I'm using a SanDisk Flash drive, this is probably labeled differently when you try.)
- select to boot the live version in the bootloader (nevermind that the
bootloader is flipped 90°, booting might also take a while)
- once gnome booted click the activities hot-corner (right top in gnome)
- click debian installer to start it (usually the first item dock on the left)
- configure everything to your liking.
- manual disk setup is currently required, I removed all existing windows
partitions and set the partitions it up like this:
- 1st partition - mount point: /boot, flags: legacy-boot, size: 200MB, fs: ext2
- 2nd partition - mount point: /boot/efi, flags: boot, site: 55MB, fs: fat32
- 3rd partition - mount point: /, flags: none, size: the rest of the avialable space, fs: ext4
- (note: I didn't configure a swap partition because I want the eMMC to last as long
as possible)
That's pretty much it. Everything important seems to be working. After waking
up from power saving mode both the trackpad and keyboard are not working
anymore. A simple workaround is to just disconnect the tablet and re-attach
it, so I didn't look any further into this as of now.
Occasionally I'm dealing with files that are opaque to me. file helps a lot
with getting a rough idea of what I'm looking at. Today I discovered extract
though. It's a command line tool like file but it doesn't only guess the file
type. It also tries to parse metadata from the file and displays it. For now I
tested it with audio and image files and it happily displayed ID3 and EXIF
infos. This is quite handy.
Some applications on Debian got spell-checking built in. eg. LibreOffice, vim,
etc. There are a couple of libraries for spell-checking packaged for Debian.
Sofar I'm aware of three. So this is what I install to make sure I've got German spell-checking available in most applications:
# install de dictionaries for most apps:
sudo apt install aspell-de myspell-de-de hunspell-de-de
# libre office needs some extra love thou:
sudo apt install --install-suggests libreoffice-l10n-de
I'm not sure why Debian developers think it's good to enable bluetooth
automatically on boot. I think this is a privacy issue and would prefer
bluetooth to be "opt-in". So here's how to make sure bluetooth is turned off by
default:
# install tool for disabling bluetooth
# it's a shame debian has no api for this!
sudo apt install rfkill
# setup systemd unit
cat << EOF | sudo bash -c 'cat > /etc/systemd/system/disable-bluetooth-on-startup.service'
[Unit]
Description=Make shure Bluetooth is disabled on system start.
After=bluetooth.service
[Service]
ExecStart=rfkill block bluetooth
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF
# enable systemd unit
sudo systemctl enable disable-bluetooth-on-startup
On Debian 10 suspending ThinkPad S1 Yoga does not work for me. When I call
systemctl suspend the device suspends and instantly wakes up again. I could
fix it by flicking the XHC switch in /proc/acpi/wakeup. I used to use persist
this in /etc/rc.local in the past. But it's not there anymore on Debian 10.
So here's how I persisted this using a systemd unit:
cat << EOF | sudo bash -c 'cat > /etc/systemd/system/thinkpad-s1-suspend-fix.service'
[Unit]
Description=thinkpad_s1_suspend_fix
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=bash -c 'grep 'XHC.*enabled' /proc/acpi/wakeup && echo XHC > /proc/acpi/wakeup'
StandardOutput=tty
RemainAfterExit=yes
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF
Now lets tell systemd to apply this fix on boot and also apply it right now:
sudo systemctl enable thinkpad-s1-suspend-fix.service
sudo systemctl start thinkpad-s1-suspend-fix.service
Too bad most computer games are non-free. But there are suprisingly many libre
games. They're not necessarily on par with their prorietary counterparts, but
they're fun too. Here's a curated list of libre games:
https://osgameclones.com