Category: Mint

things i like about gnome 46

whbeebe

I haven’t been a fan of the Gnome desktop environment. It’s why I used KDE 3, then 4, or anything else that wasn’t Gnome, going back nearly two decades of Linux usage. I’m still not a fan of the pure Gnome desktop such as you’ll find on Fedora distributions, and of course RHEL. But the desktop provided in the last few Ubuntu releases, and especially 24.04, is a lot more satisfying to use and to look at. Linux distributions I can install on a Raspberry Pi 5 are limited compared to Intel/AMD systems, leaving me with few good choices. Fortunately I’ve discovered Ubuntu 24.04 turns the Raspberry Pi 5 into a decent machine for both general computing needs as well as development aimed at Raspberry Pi’s unique features. This post is aimed at surfacing those Gnome 46 desktop features I’ve grown to like and appreciate.

First up is the Files application.

Gnome 46 Files

The Gnome 46 file viewer is extremely clean and easy to read. I like how the left side panel is unbroken from the bottom to the top. I like how I can simply select icon view and then change the sizes to provide an easy to see and easy to read view of my filesystem, in this case my home directory.

Gnome 46 Files with menu

By configuring Files to show hidden files, and by using the Icon Size ‘+’ and ‘-‘ selectors, I can see every file clearly. It’s dead simple to configure and a breeze to use once configured. In the ancient times I set up my graphical file views to look like what you’d get with ls -la, which is to say a list view with way too much information in tiny type running down the page. I’ve since convinced myself through experimenting with the settings that icon view is much more efficient, especially in a folder with lots of items.

Finder, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

This is how my folders are set up on my Macs. You’ll note the strong design similarities. Do I prefer one over the other? Not anymore.

Another Gnome 46 desktop application I prefer over everything else I’ve tried is System Monitor and Resources view.

System Monitor Resources view

Once again an utterly clean design that I can quickly read and understand. Normally I have the Disk panel at the bottom closed, but for illustrative purposes I opened it up.

Given sufficient time I’m sure I’ll come across some feature or behavior that will annoy me. At this point in time I’m still in the “honeymoon” phase of using this distribution on this machine. I’ll see how long it lasts.

building python 3.13.0 beta 1 on linux mint 21.3

whbeebe

Python 3.13.0 Beta 1 was released Wednesday 8 May by the Python Foundation (see link to announcement below). I downloaded the sources and built it. Here’s what I did to set up for this beta release.

Install Build Prerequisites

You need to install the following packages in order to build every module in Python. There is one additional package dependency that Python 3.13 will need to build, and it’s libmpdec-dev. Every other Python version prior to 3.13 did not need this package installed.

sudo apt install zlib1g-dev \libncurses5-dev \libgdbm-dev \libnss3-dev \libssl-dev \libreadline-dev \libffi-dev \libsqlite3-dev \libbz2-dev \tk \tk-dev \liblzma-dev \libgdbm-compat-dev \libmpdec-dev

Build And Install Python 3.13.0 Beta 1

  • Download the latest Python version from https://www.python.org/downloads/
  • Untar the file into a work folder of your choice
  • Make a build directory at the same level as the untarred source directory.
  • From within the build directory execute the configure script. In this example we’re building Python 3.13.0b1.
    ../Python-3.13.0b1/configure --enable-optimizations
  • Within the build directory run make.
  • Install into the alternate location for this version of Python:
    sudo -H make altinstall
  • Check for the alternate location with which python3.13 . It should return /usr/local/bin/python3.13 .

Create A Virtual Work Environment

  • In your home directory create a work folder. On my system I named it ‘VPython’, but you can call it whatever you want.
  • Change directory into it, then create a Python virtual environment using, as an example, python3.13 -m venv 313.
  • There is a bin directory in the virtual directory you created, which in this example was 313. Start the environment with source 313/bin/activate .

I created an alias so that typing 313 in any shell starts the environment. The alias should source the full path and the script in the virtual environment’s bin directory. When active, typing deactivate drops you back to a regular shell environment. See the following screen capture.

Python 3.13.0 beta 1 screen capture

Note that there are new, and significant, changes coming to Python via version 3.13. The screen capture hints at just several of the new features, colorization and much better error reporting in the REPL. Note also that you no longer have to type exit() as a function to exit the REPL. It appears that Python is adding massive quality-of-life upgrades, starting with 3.13.

Announcement: https://pythoninsider.blogspot.com/2024/05/python-3130-beta-1-released.html