DEV Community

Discussion on: My beautiful Linux development environment

Collapse
 
prahladyeri profile image
Prahlad Yeri • Edited

Nice!

I personally prefer XFCE desktop environment (Xubuntu LTS to be specific) as performance is more important to me than theming and UI enhancements. And besides, I like its minimal RAM consumption (yeah, 32GB is lots of RAM but even that gets scarce when you get into web development!).

For emails, I like thunderbird which is a wonderful email client. I don't like Mailspring for two reasons:

  1. Electron is a hog on resources.
  2. Its proprietary and closed-source in nature.

LibreOffice is great for office work, yeah. And I also use GIMP for image editing and meld for file/folder comparison (which is similar to BeyondCompare).

Apart from that, I use a whole lot of other linux tools like geany, synaptic, tmux, dict, etc..

Collapse
 
deepu105 profile image
Deepu K Sasidharan

If you don't care about UI/UX then, of course, there are distros and DEs that are better. But I'm a sucker for nice UI/UX and Gnome has one of the best in Linux world. Also, I have not encountered any performance issue with this setup so far. I believe you would notice it only in a less powerful laptop.

I tried Thunderbird and Evolution, but they were too cluttered for my taste. I like the minimal UX of Mailspring. I don't notice resource hog. It's not closed source see this github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring

And of course, GIMP is a given, though I miss Photoshop. I'll try Meld.

Collapse
 
moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

If you don't care about UI/UX then, of course, there are distros and DEs that are better

I think this is very misleading. UX is user experience and that experience depends on a lot of things. My experience on a slower laptop with a heavyweight DE is going to be worse than my experience with a lightweight DE on the same hardware. Simply correlating UX with things looking pretty is not helpful in the real world. My experience using a different desktop paradigm is also going to be very subjective.

Thread Thread
 
deepu105 profile image
Deepu K Sasidharan

Agree I should have been clearer. I was talking about a nice UI and yes UX is subjective

Collapse
 
moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair • Edited

It's not closed source see this github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring

From the link you gave:

Mailspring's sync engine is spawned by the Electron application and runs locally on your computer. It will be open-sourced in the future but is currently closed source. (emphasis mine)

Thread Thread
 
deepu105 profile image
Deepu K Sasidharan

Ya, the sync engine is not oss. I was referring to the client itself. Anyway I don't consider that as a negative. Being a OSS developer myself IMO, being closed source doesn't make something bad.