Back In the Day

I’ve used GNU/Linux since about Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake when it was released in 2006. Before that I had always used Windows at home and after the iMac fell out of favor for computer education I also used Windows at school. I remember the early days of Windows when Windows was an application that booted on top of DOS. The days when DRM was an after thought and people shared physical media.

One day I was surfing the web on Windows 2000 in Internet Explorer looking for a wallpaper when I saw an image of cheeky penguin holding a rocket launcher from Quake 3 with a helmet that says “Linux Rocks”. The wallpaper had a heading that said born to frag.

This penguin’s name is Tux and he would be my introduction to Linux. Somehow from this image of tux I found my way to distrowatch and learned how to burn a live CD. I remember loving the compositors and desktop environments that different Linux distributions used. I found myself distribution hopping frequently with a big stack of live CDs. Puppy Linux, DSL, Fedora and Ubuntu were some of the first I started with.

Think Aluminum

I remember some of my more liberal minded teachers in high school who loved Macintosh and had the posters from their “think different” branding campaign on their wall. The ones with Albert Einstein and John Lennon and all of these supposedly free thinkers. These campaigns are obviously contradictory to the way apple really operates. Apple does everything it can to trap you in its convenient digital ecosystem and they make customization difficult. It is obvious that Apple is pushing complete conformity and deviations are not covered by Apple Care.

Uniformity is Freedom

When I got to college there was an utter homogeneity in the design department. No one used anything except for proprietary Apple hardware and Adobe software. This was a throw back to when windows didn’t support some design software and the hardware was often slower for production. It was also probably to provide a uniform system for displaying colors.

I was adverse to the complete congruence of devices because I understood the limitations of the Macintosh environment. Most useful software is proprietary and outside of production software nothing uniquely interesting runs on the platform. At the time a good friend of mine would keep a Boot Camp partition just to play DOTA 2.

The other thing that bothered me about this situation was that it was a form of class signaling. People buy a Mac laptop their freshman year because they don’t know much about computers and its a premium product that they see their peers with. Their professors remember when you needed a Mac to run QuarkXPress back in 1987. So they do nothing but encourage them based on outdated precepts.

Many college aged people are hyper susceptible to brands and authority figures because of the scholastic environment. It’s not unusual to go into a classroom and see rows of people with identical Mac Books. Its almost religious, like everyone has their holy book open in their pews.

Any Way the Wind Blows

I had to use Windows all the way through school to work on my projects at home because they required Adobe Software to edit the files, and I would never consider buying Macintosh hardware because of the limitation for upgrades. Not to mention the premium price.

I tried using Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal once during this time figuring if I liked it more maybe I could hack something together that would allow me to do my work. However the support was just not as robust as it is today and Ubuntu  made some changes I was uncomfortable with. Canonical had forsaken my favorite desktop environment Gnome 2 to use the adware riddled mess that was Unity at the time.

So I kept using Windows 8 with all of the “features” locked down. Until one day I decided to upgrade to Windows 10 for compatibility with a new PCI device and I hated it. The orwellware was so obvious and the whole agenda behind the software was so transparent I felt uneasy using it. I cringed knowing that as the end user I had no way to disable Cortana or review updates before they happen. After I installed my Adobe software in case I needed it rarely touched it. I had to find something else.

Cooperation with Humanity

I went on the Ubuntu website to see what had become of it. I had used Arch and Fedora in the past but I was so trained to use apt and the immense community support that comes from the Ubuntu/Debian community. So I still had confidence that Ubuntu was the right choice for me.

I just needed to find the right desktop environment. My desktop is powerful enough to run any effects a window manager might throw its way. So I went for something with style. I went with something that is familiar that is an improvement over what I was using. I ended up installing a version of Ubuntu with the Budgie Desktop environment which was developed for the Solus project. If I knew about Solus before all of this I probably would have given it a try. I’ve even talked to the lead experience designer for Solus Joshua Strobl on IRC about some of  the ways budgie works and what he plans to do with it in the future.

Budgie

Ubuntu-Budgie is great. Budgie uses many resources from Gnome 3, and Ubuntu-Budgie uses all the same files and repositories as Ubuntu. It functions very similarly to Gnome 2 out of the box.

Budgie can be customized to be more like the Windows Shell or more like Apple’s Aqua. Most of these customization are done through applets which are easily accessed through the Budgie menus. Its the ideal desktop for people who want something similar to Mac or Windows but don’t really know which features they need. The bar is currently only supported on single monitors. It seems to be an interface with hybrid devices in mind.

Graphics

On top of Ubuntu Budgie I installed a ton of free graphics software. Since I have formal training with the Adobe software  its hard to learn new ways of doing things. However, I have confidence I  can commit myself to breaking away from Adobe. Hopefully there will be few features that I will miss. I have used Gimp extensively in the  past so its not quiet so difficult to adjust  to as software like Inkscape or Scribus. Having only a little experience in video editing I actually find the layout and features more intuitive and flexible in Kdenlive than Adobe After Effects. I can also see Krita eventually being better than any proprietary drawing software.

Along with Budgie I also installed a window manager called i3 which I can switch to in Light DM. i3 Is lighter than a full desktop environment. It does what Unity tries to accomplish in minimizing mouse movement only with a different philosophy. i3 primarily uses the keyboard and work spaces to arrange windows to efficiently make use of the screen. i3 feels somewhat un-natural for graphics applications at first because of its tiling functionality. For editing text and browsing the web its an excellent break from budgie. There are no distractions in i3 after its configured and everything can be manipulated with hotkeys and the config files.

New Frontiers

I was pretty  pleased with this setup for about half a year until I started to realize that some of the more cutting edge packages weren’t supported by the long term 18.04 Bionic Beaver release of Ubuntu. I upgraded to 19.04 Disco Dingo I enabled some repositories I shouldn’t have and borked everything.

Finally I decided to hop to Arch to get the cutting edge packages I wanted. In the past I had installed Arch through the net installer on a very slow computer. It took all day for me to figure out with my current level of experience. So I decided to try Manjaro because someone told me its like Ubuntu for Arch. Manjaro uses a delayed release scheme which makes it more stable than vanilla arch. It has an intuitive graphical installer and loads of images for different desktop environments.

I boot up Manjaro with XFCE use the graphical installer and everything comes together spic ‘n span. I never agreed to EULA or had to turn off any spyware. But I find out that XFCE support for multiple monitors is buggy so I install a bare-bones version of Gnome 3 and remove all of the XFCE applications.

Gnome 3

Gnome has changed more that I ever considered possible. It is a fantastic next generation desktop that makes managing workflow easy. It really helps me to understand what Ubuntu was trying to do with unity. The work-spaces and windows in Gnome 3 are easily accessible. The favorites in the side panel makes it easy to feel like everything is just a click away. Its easy to setup shortcuts and manage system settings in Gnome.

Gnome 3 is much more similar to Unity than I anticipated. Switching to Gnome made me realize that the features that were later added to Unity were good. It was narrow minded to boycott Unity. I didn’t understand how to use a keyboard driven interface yet. I still had to learn the joys of mechanical keyboards when unity came out, and without learning the logic behind keyboard driven interfaces the hard way with i3 I might still be apprehensive with using Gnome 3.

Despite its flashy usable interface Gnome 3 isn’t quite what I need. I installed i3 along with Gnome 3. I wrote some amendments to my i3 .config to move away from the Ubuntu orange color scheme I was using to one more in line with aesthetic of Manjaro and I can say I’m satisfied with using this as my space to create while I ween myself off of Windows.

No Place Like Gnome

I used i3 and Gnome 3 for about two months before I realized that Gnome 3 is great unless you want to add functionality. Gnome 3 extensions are managed in from a browser extension on Gnome’s website. Sometimes they fail to update sometimes they’re incompatible with certain versions of the gnome shell. Extensions sometimes break when new updates come out and there was even a malware designed recently to exploit new users confusion about how the extension system works.

Budgie and Gnome 3 work but they’ve lost focus to some extent by focusing on touch based and hybrid devices. In the end whats old is new I switched to MATE which is the continuation of the Gnome 2 desktop environment. The Gnome 2 desktop nurtured my interest in Linux when I started on Natty Narwhal. MATE is the most mature robust version of the Gnome 2 experience. It has all the options I remember with the added patina that 13 years of development provides. It looks great, its snappy, its intuitive and customizable.

Just Say No!

I run software that is closed and uses DRM but I shouldn’t. Proprietary software is a bad habit like smoking. But there’s no age limit on proprietary software and no one tells us its bad for us. A barely literate child can sit down at a tablet or computer and accept a EULA. That child is now a data point in an information harvesting apparatus more advanced than their comprehension could encompass.

If you caught a lawyer skulking around the park convincing kids to sign contracts selling their rights to privacy so they can use the slide he’d be run out of town. But since the way tech companies do it is so abstract to the layman no one bats an eyelash.

Linux is the way to go because of the amount of control it gives the user. If we cant fully escape participating in the ways technology seeks to exploit us we can at least do what we can to have a little more sovereignty over our digital lives than we normally would if we went with the consensus.

The Windows and Mac dialectic hypnotizes the majority of people into believing the option is Apple or Microsoft when really its  Apple, Microsoft and a third option which comprises the total ingenuity of humanity to create things for each other instead of exploiting each other.  The sea lions are closing in, but there’s a hope that maybe thousands of penguins will come together and build a boat of driftwood and mackerel then sail the sea to find new beaches and eat new and exotic fish.

Does it Art?

So far I’ve talked a lot about my history and opinions on Linux, but I haven’t really addressed what is important to designers. Does it make art? The short answer is yes. The long answer is you can do almost anything you need to produce art on Linux with some limitations. These limitations are mostly around licensing of things like codecs and output files. These limitations don’t hamper the creative or productive process contingent on your willingness to get your hands dirty. Freedom is worth the inconvenience of having to learn new things or change the way you do something.

The advantage of Linux to the designer is customization. An artist shouldn’t sit down at their desktop and feel uninspired or lost. If you use your computer for art it should be something that inspires you and something you understand intimately. Your PC should be an implement forged from your creative process. One that you can use to create more like the blacksmiths forge and anvil.

My Desktop is just as important as my pen. If I need to fill out some forms ill use a Bic. If I need to draw something and express my ideas efficiently I need quality pen. Linux is a quality operating system.

Call to Action

Its unfortunate that Linux doesn’t appeal to the design community at large. Many artists are Ideologues and that’s why they make art. However somehow that ideology gets lost in the market place of the spectacle, and creativity gets squandered on commercial advertisement and the tastes house wives.

Artists fail to see that they are contributing to their own exploitation by paying Adobe subscriptions. Subscriptions for software that they could have given to a open source or free software project which doesn’t seek to exploit their needs. Digital artists could be sovereign from the influence of proprietary software and predatory business practices if we all agreed to use and support free software & open source software.

Linux needs our contributions as designers to be relevant. That wallpaper of tux with the rocket launcher from quake sent me into all these explorations and lead me to know more about computers than I ever expected to. Linux attracts many technical people who have to work on servers or spend long periods of time programming. There are enough of these people to go around. People with variables and parameters rambling around in their heads are not as rare as someone with good ideas on interface design that can communicate with the logical analytic types.

Designers are the bridge between the technical person and the layman. What the tractor operator is to the tractor engineer. The engineer doesn’t know the operator needs an air conditioning system because he is in the office deciding how thick the bolts should be. If you have a problem don’t give up, reach out to the developers. Your input could lead to their design becoming more humane.