Eric S Raymond's Setup | Hacker News Reader

Eric S Raymond's Setup

eric.s.raymond.usesthis.com

54 pointssasvari59 comments

Two things struck me as particularly surprising: He's still running a (high quality) 21" CRT. And he's using Ubuntu (considering switching to Arch). Somehow I expected him to be using some sort of insane manual install maintained since the nineties.

Monitors took a huge step backwards in the switch from CRTs to LCDs.

Up until just 2 or 3 years ago I was still using a gigantic Dell CRT that I had bought from a coworker for $10. It had better color, higher DPI, higher resolution and a better response time than the expensive LCD that replaced it.

Oh, and it wasn't widescreen, which was nice.

Yeah but it feels like staring into a light bulb, doesn't it?

An LCD screen literally has a fluorescent lamp inside it. What's your point?

Well said... I miss my old 21" CRT that had higher resolution than my current LCDs. (1920x1200 vs 1920x1080). Damn HD TV's for ruining the resolution craze.

1920x1200 LCDs are still available, e.g. the Dell UltraSharp U241x, which are also very good displays overall (it's not a TN panel for starters).

Not the LED ones.

Maybe I've never used good CRTs? They have always given me migraines. I was seriously considering whether I needed to give up on being a developer because I wasn't sure I could continue to work with computers around the time LCDs started taking over.

LCDs still sometimes give me migraines (after 12+ hours), and there's a big difference between high-quality and low-quality monitors; but I would never go back. I also don't recall CRTs being better (in terms of color, DPI and resolution) than the good monitors I use today.

Yep, the average bundled CRT was pretty terrible and far below the average bundled LCD.

The higher-end CRTs (Trinitrons etc) were great, but tended to wear out over time. I'm somewhat surprised that Raymond still has one that hasn't gone blurry, as I haven't seen a nicely working one in quite a while.

Trinitrons look great when they are new, but wear out way too fast. I stick to shadowmask screens for that reason (and still use a nice CRT at home)

One thing I noticed is that many Americans had their CRTs at a 60Hz refresh rate. That instantly hurt my eyes so bad I couldn't look at the screen for more than a few seconds without them hurting a lot. Yet the Americans were completely impervious to this.

In Europe there was legislation mandating a minimum refresh rate of 72Hz and I ran all my monitors at 85Hz.

The switch happened more than 2 or 3 years ago. My ~$600 2004 LCDs had similar or better color, the same DPI, and a response time that was fast enough for anything short of FPS games, and that was against my beloved FD Trinitron. My ~$800 2007 LCDs beat CRTs on pretty much everything by a large margin.

And my $150 2012 LCD is really quite satisfactory. You're really curious about why the switch happened?

No, I was just refuting that LCDs were a step backwards from CRT until recently.

Working in IT I am rather glad CRT are dead... Especially Sun Microsystem monitors.

I think they would line those things with lead.

So did I. Though not as insane as RMS. I wonder though, why would he hate 16:9. Personally I like more width as I split Vim buffer vertically or tile more windows in that direction.

My dislike is that it loses a bunch of vertical space.

1920x1080 screens have 10% less vertical space than the older 1600x1200 screens. When writing code, it would be nice to have the extra 120 pixels available to see more of the file without scrolling. When reading PDFs or ebooks I'd like to see a single large page instead of two small pages right next to each other. Same with webpages - 99.9% of websites are hard coded to be <1000 pixels wide. It's pretty rare I need to see two websites side by side, but I have to do extra vertical scrolling a million times a day.

I've never seen the benefit of tiling a bunch of windows, either. I can only concentrate on one window at a time, so, IMO, showing a million windows just adds a bunch of distraction.

Widescreen is nice for watching movies, but terrible for everything I spend time doing on the computer.

I think there are plenty of arguments for both sides and it comes down to a matter of personal taste and habit.

Widescreen is also quite awkward in a portrait format, which I really liked with some old 1600x1200 displays, especially once you hit 3 monitors or more. Very nice vertical resolution, and you don't run into the "surveying my lordly domain" problem. Sure, a high enough resolution would be okay, too, as I wouldn't care as much whether I'd look at two 1200x1600 monitors side-by-side or one widescreen monitor with a 1600-ish v-res, but in all these years. there are only a few monitors that go beyond 1920/1600x1200, and most of them are ridiculously overpriced.

The lack of vertical space helps me keep my functions short and to the point.

I typically work around this by having dual monitors and having one mounted vertically and the other horizontally.

What monitors do you use?

I've tried that a couple times now, and always revert to having both horizontal because rectangular pixel shapes were messing up the font rendering.

Right now it's Samsung SyncMaster 2443s. The trick is to go into the font stuff and explain the LCD layout to the font renderer. I think MacOS already does this but on Linux it's usually somewhere in Appearance.

Wide is fine, but we used to have 16:10 screens with the same horizontal resolution available as the current crop of 16:9 monitors. Now they're becoming extinct.

I also think 4x3 is better than 16:9 but market forces have made the latter the best option. One can get a 16:9 screen that's wider, taller, cheaper and better overall quality than basically any 4x3 screen.

16:9 might be the best for watching films, but not for stacking windows, or preserving space for menus, or scrolling across text, or exploring graphical listings, or basically 90%+ of the activities you typically do on a computer rather than a TV.

My main set-up is a widescreen 24-inch screen in the centre and 2 19-inch old Eizo screens that I preserve since long ago (only 1280x1024 each but impressive colour and image quality). These often have virtual machines open in full screen or terminal sessions. I use one of these to dock my laptop as well, in a top-bottom arrangement. I'd much rather have a triple 4x3 if cost was comparable, but it's not and I wouldn't change my current set-up for a while unless one of the screens died.

> Displays with 16x9 aspect ratio - they’re stretched in the wrong direction, vertically cramping my editor window and ergonomically poor for web browsing. Sadly, I expect to have to live with 16x9 in the future.

Does he not realize you can rotate the displays?

You can't rotate most desktop monitors (though its easy to find one you can rotate if you look), and I'm not aware of any laptop that lets you rotate the display.

xrandr --output $OUTPUT_NAME --rotate left

To physically position the monitor, changing to an external VESA-mount arm is a good solution. Since the hole pattern is square, you don't have to opt for a rotating mount -- though many such arms will do that for you, as well.

To rotate a laptop display, better plug in an external keyboard and pointing device. Then you need to figure out a rest for it...

Looking at the top 4 monitors advertised to me on NewEgg, only the most expensive one had the right holes on the back for you to use that sort of mounting arm.

When you rotate the display the image quality drops significantly. The change in hue is very high on the vertical and you'll notice it even if you don't pay attention.

What you say is true if you rotate the cheaper TN based monitors. I have a Dell 24' monitor in portrait mode and it looks just fine as it is an IPS monitor.

I also have one Dell and one HP IPS monitor in portrait mode and they don't look fine at all. They are barely acceptable. There's no hue degradation, but there's a huge contrast degradation plus font subpixel rendering is broken.

I do see a difference between the portrait monitor and the others (it seats between two TN 24' Samsungs) but it is perfectably acceptable for writing code.

Cheaper TN panels are better at fast moving graphics (video games for example), but have a poor viewing angle. More expensive IPS panels have a better viewing angle, but not as good at moving graphics. I have a Dell IPS panel, which I specifically bought to use in portrait mode.

> ergonomically poor for web browsing

Does no one realize you don't have to have full screen windows?

This is one of the coolest sites I ever saw (I don't mean only Raymond, just go to the whole interviews list).

Thanks for the link.

It's great at the start. Then you start to get bored (though not really the fault of the site) when you see that pretty much everyone's setup is "Mac Book Pro with 24' cinema display".

I liked this one the most: http://mark.pilgrim.usesthis.com/

Please note that Mark does not use Google stuff for his books. He uses Emacs!

Now that is interesting, isn't it?

> The desktop ensemble is rounded out with Logitech speakers and a hefty subwoofer, as I like intricate music playing while I hack (Liquid Tension Experiment playing now).

I would have liked to have heard what else he listens to. Never heard of this band but they sound like Dethklok meets Antiloop or something. Very interesting and cool.

I always find I can work better to "progressive instrumental" too: no lyrics or vocals.

Liquid Tension Experiment is Dream Theater (John Petrucci, Jordan Rudess, Mike Portnoy) with a different bass player (Tony Levin)

It doesn't really make sense that I have more and better equipment than ESR. You would think in his field he would spend more money on technology.

If ESR is able to be productive with the gear he has, I don't see why he would need to spend more money. Tools are necessary, but the marginal utility of upgrades drops off pretty quickly. I'm reminded of this comic strip: http://whattheduck.com/strip/95

>If ESR is able to be productive with the gear he has, I don't see why he would need to spend more money.

Has he done anything productive the last 10 years? His last major project I remember was the Linux kernel configuration program fiasco.

Jeez. The spirit and tone of this comment seem incredibly obnoxious.

Whereas the "OMG, ESR manages to be productive with so little" worship thing wasn't?

How about just answering the question then?

The argument that it's equally obnoxious to assume that someone who's made useful contributions in the past has been productive in the last decade as it is to assume they haven't because you can't recall being told about any, is falling flat with me.

Eric S. Raymond talks a lot about about his importance, but in reality he has produced no software of value, in fact almost no software at all. The arrogant statement he made in the beginning of the interview is a blatant lie:

> You rely on my software every time you use a browser, a smartphone, or a gaming console.

ESR is known for his books, not for his code.

That is because he has been working mostly on infrastructure, http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4071 , http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4351 and http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4335 , for example.

I think he's referring to giflib or pnglib there. Those libraries are fairly widely used in many places and is probably the most widely used code he is associated with. That said, he is fairly egoistical. I don't think even he would deny that.

Well, I checked pnglib for one. He is one of 20+ contributors, not an original project founder, and was only active on it for like 2 years (2000-2002 IIRC):

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/libpng-LICENSE.txt

I wouldn't call that "people depending on MY software everyday".

I wouldn't call that "people depending on MY software everyday".

You and I wouldn't but the person who calls himself "one of the senior cadre who make the internet work" [paraphrasing there] certainly would.

>The argument that it's equally obnoxious to assume that someone who's made useful contributions in the past has been productive in the last decade as it is to assume they haven't because you can't recall being told about any, is falling flat with me.

1) I don't think he made any major useful contributions, ever. He made some marginal contributions, but on the level of major league OSS players. The only exception is his C&tB book.

2) I didn't assume, I asked, hence the question mark at the end of my, er, question. I also added as a informational point that I don't recall anything. And, no, it's not because I don't follow OSS or software developments in general.

http://www.catb.org/gpsd/

I used to play a high-quality Linux game called Battle for Wesnoth to which he contributed.

He doesn't need it and you probably don't either.

Honestly, are you more productive compared to 10 years ago?

I'm not. 99% of the computing performance enhancements have been burned straight away on inefficiencies.

Back in '99 I was unfortunate enough to have a fire which melted a lot of my kit. I got by on a 100Mhz Pentium with 32mb of RAM for 3 months quite happily.

Productive? Certainly not, but that's not the fault or the point of the equipment.

I'm just surprised.. I spend a lot on tech because I love it, and I expect others who are so immersed in tech to do the same. My computer is almost 2 years old now, but it's a quad-core with 12GB ram and 2TB storage (including an SSD boot drive)... I have 4 computers in my house (2 PC Desktops, 1 Mac Mini, and a laptop) along with an iPad3. I love this stuff.

Thanks for describing your penis.

Mine is a wimpy 5 year old Thinkpad but it's how you use it that counts :)

I was also surprised by the absence of cutting edge gear... and then reminded myself that it's not the gear but the mind behind the gear that counts. That's so easy to forget.

I thought the same thing...at first.

If he's not playing games or watching movies on his setup, only using emacs and a terminal, what benefit would the newer hardware get him?

He does want an SSD. That is a definite improvement, in general and especially when you are compiling.

Most of my computer upgrades are driven by "visual" stuff. Movies (HTPC), games (desktop/laptop) and Visual Studio/Eclipse (desktop at home and work).

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