Shawn Blanc has recently finished a series of articles which took the reader on a tour of his Mac. They’re really good posts, you should give ‘em a read. But in reading them I’ve been inspired to take you on a tour of my PC as well. This article isn’t going to be as in depth as Shawn’s but I hope they will still be enlightening.
I considered writing first about my hardware but I think that for most people this would be exceedingly dry and crusty. It bears not a little significance that my PC is outfitted with the latest release of Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn at the time of writing). I also have a 20” flat screen monitor and a Dell Dimension E520. Now that the preliminaries are done I’ll just jump right in with the first thing, the launcher.
Application Launcher
Forgive the blurriness of this shot of the app launcher, I tried to do a screenshot but for some reason it won’t let me take a screenshot of it; must be shy. The above shot was taken with my camera.
I’ve installed a launcher dock that is somewhat similar to OS X. It’s definitely not as easy to change the contents contained in it, and it was a beast to install correctly. But that’s because it’s not even pre-alpha, it’s basically just a proof of concept application. I use it, however, because it’s very stable for me and it’s incredibly useful. Also, it just looks soooo nice.
Custom Icons
The default icon sets that ship with Ubuntu are good, there’s no doubt about that. But I wanted more than good, I wanted great. I wanted a rich user experience. The icon theme I’m using is called Dropline Neu and is basically a very smooth set of icons. They bear a lot of resemblance to OS X icons. The iPod icon is not included in the Dropline Neu set. I had to go hunting for it and I honestly forget where I found them.
Desklets
I’m using gDesklets to add a bit of functionality to the desktop environment. Currently I’ve got the weather, CPU usage and uptime being displayed. I’ve also installed cairo clock because it’s sooo pretty. You can see all those things in the above screenshot. I’ve also brought up my text editor, SciTE, and made it semi-translucent to show you what that particular effect looks like.
The Cube
Having 4 workspaces is addicting. After using Ubuntu with this setup for this long I cringe when I have to use an operating system that only has one workspace or desktop. The way I currently utilize the 4 workstations is to put them on a cube via Compiz. It adds a bit of eye candy and a TON of functionality.
The Disk
A cool app for Ubuntu is the disk usage analyzer. It gives you a visual representation of the contents of your hard disk. As you can see, I’ve got quite a bit of music on my PC. I should also point out that I’ve got an enlarged recycle bin. That sounds like a medical issue but it’s really not. I like big trash cans because I throw a lot of stuff away. I’m almost OCD about throwing away junk.
