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Looks like you got a lot of feedback from your comment, but if you have the time I'd like to ask a question too. I'm still getting my feet wet with more the mor

by Pigo 10y ago

Looks like you got a lot of feedback from your comment, but if you have the time I'd like to ask a question too. I'm still getting my feet wet with more the more advanced aspects of Linux, primarily Ubuntu on my Chromebook. I always hear about people tweaking programs, but it never dawns on me what kind of tweaks are possible or even useful. I'd be interested in a couple use-cases you've come across, like problems you wanted to solve with a program and a brief overview of how you altered the source to do so. Maybe it's embarrassing to admit, but I've never tweaked anything outside of VS Code or Atom.

zeptomu 10y ago
First, it is definitely not embarrassing to admit, and the answer may be overwhelming, but you can customize nearly everything. One of the simpler things is to customize the look and feel. E.g. you could try out different desktop experiences and WMs (window managers). Most of them are just an `apt-get` away and when you logout and login again you can choose and try out a different desktop.
jlgaddis 10y ago
I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for or not, but here's a situation I encountered in just the last couple of days. I have a new workstation PC I just recently put together. It's currently running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS but I plan to switch over to Arch Linux in the near future. Because I want to use LUKS (a.k.a. full disk encryption) and ZFS (and multiple ZFS pools) on it, I decided to work through the installation procedure on a laptop first (just to make sure I've got the steps down right -- an installation w/ the root filesystem on ZFS is "non-standard", and LUKS throws additional issues into the mix) before I wipe out my primary work machine. First, by default, the LUKS setup only supports "unlocking" a single encrypted drive at boot. Since the laptop has a pair of SSDs (in a ZFS mirror), I need to unlock both of them (and my workstation has an NVMe, two SSDs, and two HDDs, so that'll be an even bigger problem!). I had to "hack on" the initramfs stuff so that I could unlock both drives when the system boots up. In addition, I have several Yubikeys and wanted to use them with LUKS. I set them up in Challenge-Response mode, programmed them with a "secret key" that I generated, and then came up with a (relatively) short(er) passphrase that I can use to unlock the disks. I also had to create a custom (initramfs) "hook" to prompt for my passphrase, detect if a Yubikey is attached and, if so, send the "challenge" to the Yubikey, receive the response from it, and use that to unlock the disks. If a Yubikey isn't attached, then I have to provide a (much longer, more secure) "backup" passphrase to unlock (each of) the disks. On the laptop, this means I can enter in my (relatively) short(er) passphrase once and unlock both disks. On my workstation, it means I'll enter it once to unlock all five disks. The alternative would be to type in my much longer, more secure passphrase FIVE separate times every time I boot the system up. None of this was very hard or time consuming, but it was necessary in order to meet my exact goals and I'm glad that Linux allows me the opportunity to do exactly this type of non-standard stuff.
xyos 10y ago
I own a Toshiba Chromebook 2, there are things that doesn't work out of the box (sleep mode, laptop mode) so I wrote some scripts to fix those issues. Also I wanted to have the same keyboard experience that I had on chrome os, so I tweaked the keyboard (upper row media keys, shift+backspace=del, etc...)
mmjaa 10y ago
The only thing I could contribute to the conversation so far would be to NEVER use PulseAudio, and commit to using JACK for all your audio I/o needs, with regards to setting up Linux (UbuntuStudio) as a high-performance DAW. This is really the great thing about Linux: we've got tons of options when it comes to audio I/o routing .. but its a liability too. My advice: commit to setting up Jack and learning it - definitely the best thing about Linux Audio.

by Pigo 10y ago

zeptomu 10y ago

First, it is definitely not embarrassing to admit, and the answer may be overwhelming, but you can customize nearly everything. One of the simpler things is to customize the look and feel. E.g. you could try out different desktop experiences and WMs (window managers). Most of them are just an `apt-get` away and when you logout and login again you can choose and try out a different desktop.

jlgaddis 10y ago

I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for or not, but here's a situation I encountered in just the last couple of days. I have a new workstation PC I just recently put together. It's currently running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS but I plan to switch over to Arch Linux in the near future. Because I want to use LUKS (a.k.a. full disk encryption) and ZFS (and multiple ZFS pools) on it, I decided to work through the installation procedure on a laptop first (just to make sure I've got the steps down right -- an installation w/ the root filesystem on ZFS is "non-standard", and LUKS throws additional issues into the mix) before I wipe out my primary work machine. First, by default, the LUKS setup only supports "unlocking" a single encrypted drive at boot. Since the laptop has a pair of SSDs (in a ZFS mirror), I need to unlock both of them (and my workstation has an NVMe, two SSDs, and two HDDs, so that'll be an even bigger problem!). I had to "hack on" the initramfs stuff so that I could unlock both drives when the system boots up. In addition, I have several Yubikeys and wanted to use them with LUKS. I set them up in Challenge-Response mode, programmed them with a "secret key" that I generated, and then came up with a (relatively) short(er) passphrase that I can use to unlock the disks. I also had to create a custom (initramfs) "hook" to prompt for my passphrase, detect if a Yubikey is attached and, if so, send the "challenge" to the Yubikey, receive the response from it, and use that to unlock the disks. If a Yubikey isn't attached, then I have to provide a (much longer, more secure) "backup" passphrase to unlock (each of) the disks. On the laptop, this means I can enter in my (relatively) short(er) passphrase once and unlock both disks. On my workstation, it means I'll enter it once to unlock all five disks. The alternative would be to type in my much longer, more secure passphrase FIVE separate times every time I boot the system up. None of this was very hard or time consuming, but it was necessary in order to meet my exact goals and I'm glad that Linux allows me the opportunity to do exactly this type of non-standard stuff.

xyos 10y ago

I own a Toshiba Chromebook 2, there are things that doesn't work out of the box (sleep mode, laptop mode) so I wrote some scripts to fix those issues. Also I wanted to have the same keyboard experience that I had on chrome os, so I tweaked the keyboard (upper row media keys, shift+backspace=del, etc...)

mmjaa 10y ago

The only thing I could contribute to the conversation so far would be to NEVER use PulseAudio, and commit to using JACK for all your audio I/o needs, with regards to setting up Linux (UbuntuStudio) as a high-performance DAW. This is really the great thing about Linux: we've got tons of options when it comes to audio I/o routing .. but its a liability too. My advice: commit to setting up Jack and learning it - definitely the best thing about Linux Audio.