Thoughts on Pop!_OS

After using an Ubuntu-based distro¹ for about a year, I decided to distro-hopped again in the past two months. The machine that I’ve been doing this is quite old and showing signs of failing drive and other internal components. Sadly, the Wi-Fi and bluetooth card died and accessing the internet from my phone using USB tethering is quite a hassle too.

Due to a now faulty machine, I decided to get a replacement. Of course it came with Windows as it’s operating system. I installed all the necessary updates on it and after setting it up, Windows is taking 2 GB of RAM at idle. Nice.

So after giving Windows a fair use (1 hour), I immediately replaced it with Debian. I used Openbox as my window manager and the experience is a breeze. The RAM usage as expected is pretty low at around 250 to 290MB. After 3 days of playing around with this new acquired machine and Debian, I read about the new release of Pop!_OS. I’ve heard about this project before but I really haven’t taken a deep look at it since I assumed it is just another Ubuntu-based distro. What caught my attention is their Pop Shell implementation. It is basically a GNOME extension which adds a tiling-window functionality on top of GNOME. Also, the project supports a wide range of hardware out of the box, and the easy setup of having graphics card drivers. These made my try out the iso and will force me to use GNOME for the first time again in 4 years. In the end, I replaced Debian with Pop.

I’ve been using it for about a week now and so far, I’m impressed. GNOME seems to be faster now, and I’m looking to use it for a quite a while. All hardware works out of the box, and what surprised me is that my machine runs cooler now compared to my setup in Debian. The Pop shell is good, although I prefer floating windows for now on this desktop environment. I’m monitoring the progress though on their GitHub page. I’m having fun now using this distro.

So far, my distro hopping came to a temporary end for this past week. I now have time for other things.

Tom Crawford, Cambridge Core Blog:

Rogue Waves occur when a larger wave appears in a group of smaller waves. In some circumstances these can lead to an exaggerated ‘Spike Wave’, or a crashing wave resembling the Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai.

This is cool. Here’s a video from PBS on explaining the history of the Hokusai’s Great Wave.

From EFF:

This month it was suddenly announced that the nonprofit that owns the .ORG domain registry was planning to sell it to a private equity firm, Ethos Capital. This could impact the millions of individuals and organizations that have a .ORG website, subjecting them to potential censorship and leaving the door open for price increases on domain registration and renewals.

Sign the petition.

Reflection

Looking out for new ways of improving how you spend your time, good decisions, and thinking scientifically may be a good start for a new year. But why we set our goals only when a new year is approaching? That’s not a good way of approach, I think. Let’s live everyday with a clear mindset and move on.

Let’s be happy.

Missed xkcd comics 2

I admittedly haven’t visited xkcd for about 8 months. What am I doing.

• Group Chat Rules
• Aurora Meaning: A bunch of open questions in solar-terrestrial physics are about to be answered
• Machine learning CAPTCHA
• Recombination and Reionization: Reionization plays a lot of Selena Gomez
• Terminator: Dark Fate
• Earthquake early warnings: earthquake spoilers
• Chemistry Nobel
• College athletes: Stephs Curry
• Drone fishing
• Math work

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 was awarded “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos” with one half to James Peebles “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology”, the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star.” ¹

Must read: Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2019

Tobias at DESK:

…our website was our home. An extension of ourselves. Every day we visited our page, tweaked it a bit here, adjusted something there, stood back and admired it. Our site was a little corner of the internet we could own.

Fast forward to now and a website almost feels old fashioned. Our social profiles are all-consuming. Curating our Instagram page is our second job. We almost feel an obligation to share our work there, in addition to our personal lives. Our little corner of the internet? It now collects cobwebs.

We control the layout of our website. We can create a page that reflects our taste, our personality, our style.

We control the narrative, too. It’s here we can finally show our work the way it’s intended to be shown. We get to tell the story exactly as we wrote it, with context the audience or user doesn’t typically have. It’s our chance to own our work and put it in its best light.

…When we create a personal website, we own it – at least to the extent that the internet, beautiful in its amorphous existence, can be owned.

A lengthy quotation from the source. I just want to put these words in my website.

Creating a website started just a hobby for me, curious about how I can make something in the internet with these lines of code. I tried different platforms over time, making many changes, adding different functions to make it look more modern. These processes had me hooked in designing and what to put for my website. Years passed and I finally had the chance of buying a domain which I can keep forever and started to build again a website from scratch. This time, I decided to go old-fashioned by only using a static html website. Today, I’m very proud on what I created.

Having this little space in the internet is what matters for myself. It reflects what my tastes, my hobbies, and my interests are. There’s no rules on what I can do, I am free. This is I think what those social media platforms taken away from people today, the freedom in the internet.