Linux Distro Hopping At Work: A Few Thoughts - VLOG#2
839In this VLOG, I'll talk about using Linux at work, and how to manage your distro hopping fever there: there are more issues with distro hopping at work than when you do it at home!
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So, Linux at work. If you've not seen the last 2 videos in the series, it's been going great. I encountered a few hiccups here and there, but I always found a pretty easy solution. Still, some stuff in elementary OSes workflow are jumping at me, now that I need to use it in a less laid back environment than my personal stuff. The main issues were the dock only being visible on the primary monitor, the alt tab switcher only cycling through windows on the current virtual desktop, and the lack of a "show desktop' keyboard shortcut.
For these, I haven't found a solution yet, and it got me thinking about other desktop environments. For example, I know that in GNOME, with a few extensions, I could configure all of these manually, and adapt them to my needs. In KDE as well, and probably in Cinnamon. I kinda got into a loop about maybe elementary OS is not perfectly suited to my needs at work, and maybe I should try and use something else.
Most of us know that feeling: distro hopping fever. Once it sets in, it's hard to shake. There are so many choices, customization, and look and feels to choose from, it's hard to stop your brain running in circles. I mean, I really liked Manjaro before it died on me, maybe on this laptop, it would be different ? Or maybe I could finally try that Arch install I've been putting of for a while. You get the point: I started having little excitement shakes, and got itchy to try something new.
Except at work, you can't just say "screw it" and wipe the drive whenever you please: you have work to do, files to save and keep, configurations, passwords saved. If you lose something, it's a bigger deal than with your personal stuff, arguably. If distro hopping makes you less productive, or makes you lose time, then you're basically losing money for your employer, so the decision has to be weighted carefully. Obviously, I wouldn't do a reinstall during my work hours. Reinstalling and trying out a new distro is always more exciting when you decide to do it, than when you actually installed and used the distro. In the end, the GUI is always a variant of what you already know, unless you're trying out something brand new, and the various tweaks and modifications, while interesting, quickly lose their "new stuff" shine.
And in the end, if what you've installed doesn't suit you after a few days, you end up using something that you like less than what you used before, so what do you do ? Do you go back to your previous distro ? Do you keep running towards distro perfection and try something else yet again ? Disrupting your habits like that can't be good for efficiency and productivity, when you keep bumping into little changes to the workflow, and small issues here and there that didn't exist in the previous distro.
Then there's the issue of the apps I use. Most of them can be replicated easily on other systems, notably Firefox, GIMP or GLIMPSE, or anything with email and calendar support. These are easy to install on any distro. But elementary OS comes with their dedicated apps, and some of these can't be found elsewhere yet. I use Notes Up for note taking, it's a beautiful markdown editor, super well integrated with the elementary style, and I've stored all my notes in that, with a database synced with pcloud to my home desktop PC. Switching from that would be annoying, even though each note is just a markdown document. It can be installed on other distros, but it will look out of place, and require some PPA's and some additional libraries.
Minder is another one that seems more complex to install on other distros. A few of the others have flatpak versions, like Vocal, or Ciano, but as I said, they're "appcenter / elementary" apps first, so they'll probably look out of place on other desktop environments.
It's an "elementary OS" specific problem, that I wouldn't have on another distro, since it's the only one that has its own small ecosystem on top of the main Linux apps everyone has access to, but it's still something I have to consider. These are all simple apps, but they're the ones I got used to. Switching to something else will make me lose time and I'll have to re-learn a new interface and contend with new quirks and behaviors.
Distro hopping at work is clearly a worst idea than distro hopping at home, and as such, I've decided to hold off.