What I use | Hacker News Reader

What I use

colin.percival.usesthis.com

79 pointscperciva32 comments

I'm not sure if this is of interest to anyone here, but we've had a few usesthis articles in the past -- and I figure that even if nobody is interested in what I use, people can talk about their own systems instead.

Have you tried under-volting and under-clocking your laptop to solve your heat problem?

Yes, but I don't want to give up the availability of short bursts of high CPU, so I only do this if I'm expecting to spend a significant time compiling things.

You can under-volt without reducing speed at any time. With a program like rmclock, you can switch to high frequencies on the fly like a turbo button.

It was a very interesting read.

On a side note, I want to thank you for all you've done on security for bsd - the OS I primarily use.

Regarding the heat issue you are having with your laptop: I was having similar problems with a different laptop, and I got an "XPad Slim" (http://www.xpad4laptop.com/) cooling pad to put under it. It weighs around a pound, has no fans, and does a pretty decent job of dispersing heat from the computer. No more burning legs!

Hmm, I may try that. Thanks!

I found it quite interesting that you seem to be a minority in the way you use the desktop. I would have expected you to run a tiling window manager and emacs or vim but it is somewhat refreshing (and interesting) that you use kde with konquerer as your browser and kwrite for code.

As an aside do you use konsole for you console as well?

Yes, I usually have at least 5 Konsole windows open on various desktops.

Love the pragmatism and what a relief to read that someone is not running a Mac!

Any reason why you are still on KDE 3.x? The latest 4.x are finally getting there, with some tweaking def. stable and usable.

I tried KDE 4 a while back (maybe last summer?) and didn't like it at all. I'm very conservative in terms of UI -- my KDE3 desktop looks very much like the Windows 95 desktop I used 10-15 years ago -- and all of the modern glitz bothers me.

That said, I'll probably upgrade to KDE4 some time soon... and then disable all of the distracting graphical features.

Seems like KDE 4 is stable enough for regular use, as long as you don't delve into any of the more fancy features.

Yep, that's what I've been hearing. Right now the main thing holding me back from upgrading is inertia.

I tried 4.0 in a VM upon release, and that scared me away from the 4.x series until 4.2. Even in 4.2, I had a lot of issues because of my heavily customized setup. I'd say that if you're happy with 3.5.x, stick with it as long as there are no major security holes.

I got tired of basic functionality being broken even in 4.3, and left for greener pastures (Openbox). I only briefly experimented with 4.4, so I can't really comment on it (though from what I did see, I was not enamored at all).

well you can disable all the bling-bling, so not so much to worry. IMHO is the new version of konsole really nice, which is actually the KDE program I use the most.

> The more fantastical option is a lightweight system with just enough power to run X and connect wirelessly to a server.

If you ever do build and use something like this, I'd like to read about the experience. I have considered trying to do something of this kind, but I always found the documentation on putting together thin clients to be woefully incomplete.

I also found it surprising that you write all your code in Kate and it is interesting that you're still on KDE 3.x (although I certainly understand why you would shy away from 4.x).

You might be interested in this: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/build-your-own-tablet...

Actually Kate is quite powerful. But he says he uses KWrite, which doesn't even have tabbing/buffer support.

(This photo, btw, could really use some color/brightness auto-balance)

From my experience, my colleague who were programming with kwrite and nano were the worst programmer ever. Of course, this means absolutely nothing about you. But maybe you don't see the point in the vim vs emacs war, however, don't you like having a complete IDE to help you out?

And the idea of vim vs nano.. it's just that once you've learn a couple of commands, you can't go back. And, once you've learn those obscure commands, who want them everywhere. (Delete up to the next "(", vim got it easily)

don't you like having a complete IDE to help you out?

Not really. Before I moved to FreeBSD I used Watcom and MSVC, and I don't feel that I'm missing anything they ever gave me. I get syntax highlighting and open-close matching from kwrite, and everything else I ever want I can do with a shell, make, grep, etc.

My colleague who uses nano and kate exclusively is the best coder at the company. Lots of great writers used crappy typewriters or pencil or pen. Who cares?

Correlation is not causation ;-)

Using simpler tools does not make you a better performer, albeit better performers seem to prefer simpler tools.

You can actually use VIM mode in KWrite/Kate ;) It's just basic editing features but works alright. And Kate does have all kind of neat stuff already. Like Ctrl+Shift+D for toggling comments? You have to install plugin to get that in VIM. Just know your tools and work with what you're comfortable with.

It's great to see an interview where Mac OS X is not the desktop OS of preference. I don't dislike Mac OS X in fact I think it is the best UNIX system for the average computer user. But considering that setups at usesthis.com are of people more involved in IT, software development and the Internet I would've thought that the share of OSes was less monotonous with more Linux and a few more BSDs.

I also use KDE3.5 since OpenBSD doesn't have KDE4 although I really like and think KDE3.5 is awesome.

openbsd has had kde4 for quite some time.

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/x11/kde4/

I'd love to see a single site where this kind of thing is aggregated. At least for famous programmers or leaders in the industry (eg. Guido, Linus, Carmack), at a bare minimum, though regular joes could participate as well.

http://usesthis.com/

LOL! man i'm an idiot. thanks for pointing that out. :)

Any reason you don't use Thunderbird 3 / 3.1 ?

Some of us dislike the new "features" in TB3, like:

- opening a new tab for each email you read

- or worse, double clicking on a collapsed thread opens a new tab for each email in the ENTIRE thread...

opening a new tab for each email you read

This can be disabled. I don't use it.

Only that I did the usesthis interview a couple of months ago -- I'm using thunderbird 3 now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com