Few weeks ago I wiped out my development laptop and installed ubuntu on it, it’s quite old and slow but I like it so I wanted to give it a bit more life and after working on Mac over the last year, and even if I really hate the all Mac experience, I fell in love with the linux kernel underneath so I decided to make the move and feel the love.
Before on windows I could just get rid of the fancy skin, disable services and others to make some spaces and optimize performance but the control you have over the OS is quite small really.
Here with Ubuntu I can finally make my operating system match the minimalism of my development ways. I tried many flavour from the normal ubuntu, kubuntu, lubuntu and LXDE. LXDE seemed to be the closer to what I was looking for at first but it was still providing more than I needed.
So I had to ask myself, what do I really need from an operating system?
1. Run application I need (of course)
2. Take as little resource as possible
And that’s pretty much it, I don’t need a taskbar, a clock, icons and all those fancy application and widget, I just need a platform where I can read my email, browse the web and develop.
So in the end I went for a minimalist installation of ubuntu, text based login and openbox as my window manager, which open automatically at login and then launch a terminal, chrome and my email client respectively in desktop 2, 3 and 4. I keep desktop 1 as my workspace.
Memory usage of my idle system is now 50MB (out of 1GB) and it only passes the 200MB barrier if I have a lot of tabs opened in Chrome (also there is lighter browser Chrome has good standard so that’s my development browser of choice) And the most important thing it’s really fast for what was originally a single core Celeron processor running Vista out of the box!
I still use Thunderbird as email client, I try Sylpheed which was lighter but I had few issues with it that sent me back to Thunderbird, also I am quite tempted to try terminal based email client. (UPDATE: Actually going for Claws-mail much lighter than Thunderbird)
As for editor after trying many I settle for vim, it’s light, simple yet elegant and it just feel like the right editor to use for me.
Now I need to set it up in dual boot on my desktop system too, I’ll always keep a windows version on that one because once in a while I need to do some gaming and nothing beat a PC for that.