Category: Desktop & Wallpaper

Desktop screenshots and wallpaper collection

PureOS – First Impressions Gallery

Today I poked around in PureOS a GNU/Linux distribution recently endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. So far I’m very impressed in what I can do with minimal effort. For starters, I had no problems creating a local installation of WordPress. (A necessity and a test in my line of work as a web developer.) It was actually pretty simple. Being based on Debian made it easy. I just swapped MariaDB out for the usual MySQL.

It’s nice to know that PureOS is another option. The best way to describe this experience is Debian + GNOME minus proprietary blobs. If I had to fine one complaint it would be that Firefox is stuck on ESR rather than the current version. However, when you’re running Free Software that’s a small price to pay for software freedom. Chromium is also available in the repository.

Creating a simple Pomodoro timer for i3

A terminal based Pomodoro coountdown doesn’t appear to exist but can be created simply in i3’s config file.

It requires the following packages to enable “notify-send” which is a simple gtk popup notification.

  • libnotify-bin
  • libnotify4

# Pomodoro start and end notifications
bindsym $mod+Control+p exec notify-send --icon=gtk-info Pomodoro "Focus for 25 minutes" && sleep 2500 && notify-send --icon=gtk-info Pomodoro "Take a 5 minute break"

This quick notification will dismiss itself in a few seconds, if you blink you may miss it.

As an alternative I’m also considering adding my bash command to lock the system and force that me to at least put in my password to continue.

Debian Stretch Desktop Update

I’m giving my Debian Stretch drive a little attention and running updates. It’s home is a 1TB 7400 RPM hard drive and serves as home to my personal and server backups as well as this machine’s Steam library.

Currently I’m running Peppermint 8 on my main SSD drive and Ubuntu 16.04.3 running i3 on my testing drive.

Side note Bryan & Matt answer my cliche question on The Lunduke Show (YouTube).

Lastly, if we lived in the dystopian future of 2037 where only only one Linux distribution survived I hope it would be Debian. (see 7:13 of the video above)