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More on Using Linux

Recently, I started using my Linux partition on my macbook and so far, things have been running pretty smoothly. I'm enjoying stumpwm with my two monitors and I'm pretty comfortable with the setup. That said, there are always some small oddities and frustrations that seem to creep in.

My biggest gripe is sound. It is unclear what Apple does to make the internal speakers sound reasonable. What is clear is that Ubuntu is not doing the same thing. While I was pretty happy my Apple keys worked for turning up and down the volume, the actual sound out of speakers is pretty terrible. It nothing headphones doesn't fix, but still a hassle.

Another issue is the sound server. In linux there are a set of back ends that "talk" to your sound hardware. Gnome (or Ubuntu) seems to adopted Pulse Audio, which is a compatibility layer on top of the lower level back ends. From a programmers prospective, this abstracts some of the more complicated issues and allows for a simpler API. From the users perspective, things just work and all seems to be well. In actuality, what really happens is that Firefox seems to eventually stop playing sound (ie Flash) and both Firefox and the Pulse Audio session need to be restarted in order to listen to hip new indie music. I'm sure much of this process has to do with the Flash plugin, but from the standpoint of a user, it's a pain.

Generally, I've found everything to be rather stable, with the exception of Firefox. It seems to always crash at some point. Flash is most likely the culprite, although I really don't spend very much time on sites using Flash. It just occurred to me that it is possible ads might be the main source of bad Flash, so I'd wonder if an ad blocker plugin might help. I'm not really a fan of ad blockers since advertising is such a critical part of the web ecosystem, yet I'm downright sick of Firefox crashing, so it might just be the way to go.

There are other issues of course. I'd like to gnome terminal, but I can't get the fonts to look like a regular xterm. I'm using Gnome with stumpwm so Adobe Air apps don't complain. This adds the gnome tool bar which is rather unnecessary. Gripes aside, it has been really easy to get back into Linux on the desktop. It is a lot of fun to have a system you can tweak to your liking. It is also kind of fun to have things to work on. While my sound issues are definitely a pain in the neck, it also gives me something to try and fix, which generally means understanding more about my system. Most of the time it is not the most useful knowledge, but often times it is really helpful stuff. For example, setting up my VPN to only be used on selected traffic. I can't say I'd reccommend using linux to everyone, but if you are using OSX because it's a *nix, it is worth trying out linux on th desktop.

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