Linux writing setup, FTW! · 9:49am Dec 14th, 2020
Just thought I'd share what my current writing setup looks like these days. There's been a lot of changes since the last time I uploaded such a thing. These days, I finally got around to switching to open source, and know I'm running a pretty customized version of Kubuntu Linux. It is not good for gaming with any kind of good graphics -- at least not with 6 monitors running off of 3 video cards! -- but that's not what my writing computer is for, anyway. Not that I did all that much gaming before on Windows. Thankfully, though, my favorite game (OpenRCT2) works great natively on Linux!
For a little explanation of what you can see here:
My main monitor is the center bottom one, where I have the main document of the story I'm working on ... with OpenOffice, which was already my favorite writing program even before going to Linux. And fun colors and fun fonts because writing is more fun that way.
The one in the top center is my time tracking sheet, which I always have open. It's a combination of to-do list, schedule, and tracking sheet to make sure I get as many writing hours as I intend to.
The one on the top left is where I usually have my working folder(s) open, whichever part of my very organized writing files I'm working with at the moment. Right now, it's also showing the cover image of the story I'm working on.
The one on the top right always has a few things: the system monitor at the top (partly transparent so as to be less distracting), the stopwatch program that tracks my writing time, and just another clock I can use when anything is fullscreen on the main screen. In this screenshot, it also has one of the notes files from this project open.
The bottom left and bottom right are both being used for more notes files in this project. (It's a really big project with lots of notes.) Bottom left is my standard place to put my notes/plan/outline of whatever project I'm working on -- the vertical screen is great for that -- and the bottom right is just extra. Oh, and by the way -- that text editor is Kate, and it's utterly awesome. Note the purple lines along the left side -- those indicate lines of text that have been modified and saved since the window was opened. Lines that have been modified but not saved yet show up with a green line next to them. And the tiny lines of text along the right side? That's actually a scrollbar, using a tiny preview image of the text file as the scrollbar itself, complete with little bits of purple or green to indicate if it's changed or saved.
Now ... that's a lot to have open at once. Opening and closing all of that every time I want to write must be a pain, right?
But that's when one of the beautiful things about Linux comes into play: multiple workspaces. If you look at the main (bottom center) screen, at the bottom left part of the taskbar, you see the numbers 1-5 with some little boxes in some of them? Those are 5 different workspaces, and the boxes in them are open windows in each one. I can switch between them with one click ... which means all these writing-related windows can come or go in one click. Besides having thumbnail previews of text files, it's probably my favorite thing about Linux. Makes it super-easy to have multiple projects and side-projects open at once, being easy to switch between them whenever I need to. Oh, and another favorite thing: just about everything in Linux has a 'night mode', and I'm really starting to enjoy that!
How many monitors do you have? I never use the workspaces since I could easily swap between programs in Windows 10 (I'm a PC gamer and Windows is my curse) and Linux. Just seemed superfluous to me. How do you even keep track which program is in which workspace?
HMMMMMMMMM
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Multi-monitor setups are where the multiple workspaces really shine. Because I've got *counts* 9 windows open in that workspace alone, it would be kind of tedious to open and minimize them one at a time. If you're just switching between a few different windows, using them one at a time, yeah, workspaces are kind of pointless. But if you're switching between whole groups of windows at a time, it starts to be pretty awesome.
And it's pretty easy to keep them straight because I pretty much always use each one for its assigned task, so I always know where to go:
1: Email/chat
2: Work (project A)
3: Work (project B)
4: Fun/time wasting
5: Extra ... which I rarely use, but it's there for overflow if all 4 others are filled with stuff and I want to open up something else real quick
So it's not really about what program is in each workspace, it's about which project is in each workspace.
Oh yeah, and that's 6 monitors. ^.^ After getting used to it, I don't know how I could live without it. I'd have to switch between windows like some kind of savage, rather than just looking a different direction to where the window I want already is.
I guess if I really had do, I could make do with 2. But I really like having both my main document and the outline open side-by side. That would be really cramped on a single monitor.
My respect!
I've also been using linux with KDE for over ten years.
I suggest you to have a look at LibreOffice.
It's basically a fork of OpenOffice which is being far better maintained and more up-to-date.
The only advantage OpenOffice has these days is its more popular name.
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Re-opening everything up after each reboot is probably fun...
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You're right, LibreOffice is much better. Also, if I remember correctly, it's a standard package for KDE.
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Actually, come to think of it, I might be running LibreOffice already. It's just so similar that I forget it's even different at all.
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Reopening after reboots really isn't an issue very much.
1: It's Linux ... so reboots are rare. I've been running like this for 2-3 months now, and I've had to restart it ... twice, I think?
2: KDE is awesome and usually manages to restore my session after reboot anyway. Sometimes it misses a window or two, but most of it will be right back where it was, automatically.
That's one heck of a setup.
I just write on a raspberry pi with almost no frills.
Ahh, a Linux useri.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/029/960/quality.jpg
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And I thought I was getting by with relatively limited processing power!
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Aw, using a different OS doesn't make anyone better than anyone else.
Though it certainly has forced me to learn a few things.
LInux is easy to use if you want out-of-the-box normal stuff ... but when you get into the weeds of customizing things... Well, I'll just say I'm more intimately familiar with setting up cron jobs through the command line than I ever wanted to be.
So this actually brings up a question that I've been meaning to ask someone for a while now, and this is as good as anywhere I suppose. I've seen a lot of writers on this site, especially the more experienced ones, mention doing their writing in outside programs like OpenOffice, Word, google docs, etc. What are the benefits to using those as opposed to just writing directly to the site with Fimfic's own text editor? It just seems like adding extra steps with having to import text from outside, and seems like it would present more opportunity for formatting errors and such between the different programs and the site.
Basically just wondering why you prefer using OpenOffice (or LibreOffice, whichever one you're actually using) over writing directly to the site.
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Try Help -> About and you should see which program you are running.
You mean you hibernate your system after each session?
I guess that works, too.
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Well, generally, I just leave it running, actually. The monitors (and speakers and other peripherals) are all on a separate power switch, so I can turn them all off together. And when that's off, the whole thing draws about 80 watts. No big deal. It does all my backups while I sleep every night anyway.
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You poor thing...
Okay... Some benefits:
1: (and most important) Ability to have local backups of all your stories! What if Fimfic has an outage or your internet connection goes down -- you're just forced to stop writing! And you'd better hope you saved recently! And what if the browser crashes? What if Fimfic stopped working entirely? Everything would just be ... gone. Not to mention it's nice to be able to work offline. Oh the number of stories I've heard of people using the online editor only to lose their entire chapter because of some glitch or power outage. Save local and save often! And you *must* have backups! You have n-1 number of copies of your story. If you have 2, you have 1. If you have 1, you have 0. What happens if Fimfic glitches and has to restore from a backup copy from before you started writing this chapter? The chapter would just be ... gone.*
2: Better spellcheck/grammar check. (And more easily customizable.) And a custom-tailored autocorrect to fix your most common typos.
3: Macros (I have one that turns -- and --- into the appropriate dashes, as well as one that automatically changes the formatting to bbcode). The bbcode one is downloaded (called BBkode), the dash one is custom made myself.
4: The ability to write in different colors and different fonts. This makes writing more fun, and picking a font that matches the tone/character helps me get/stay in character. It also makes proofreading more effective because you're more likely to notice errors if you read it again in a different font.
5: Version control! A huge one! As you revise a story, you can save new copies of it at each revision, so if you ever want to go back and un-delete that whole scene you decided was unnecessary but you've changed your mind about now, you can find it in an older version of the file.
6: Autotype. Not all editors have this, but LibreOffice does. As you type, little suggestions pop up with it trying to guess what word you're typing. If your story tends to use a certain long word often, it can save a nice bit of time. For example, you type in 'Flut' and suddenly see 'Flut[tershy]' pop up ... then you can just hit enter to have it finish the word for you instead of typing it. Once you get used to that, it can make things a bit faster and easier.
7: More accurate, more instant word count feature. Oh, and if you select a block of text, it automatically switches to telling you how many words are in the selection.
8: Standardized interface to get used to writing on, so you can comfortably slip into non-Fimfic writing tasks as well.
9: Have all your stories on your local filesystem which makes them easy to search by title or even by text they contain. (Which can start to be pretty useful if, for example, you have 100+ stories between two different Fimfic accounts and you want to remind yourself which story had a character named 'Pineapple'.)
10: Easier to share working drafts (or Patreon early access) copies with people. Almost any cloud storage service will have easier and more feature-rich sharing capabilities than Fimfic's clunky and outdated system of setting a password for the story.
11: Ability for editors to make comments on the document and point out mistakes.
And ... I guess 11 benefits is enough?
Pretty much any modern word processor can do most of those things. LibreOffice can do all of them.
*On backups... Personally, I would be crushed if anything major was wiped out by data loss, so I backup obsessively.
First, I save *very* often while writing ... often multiple times per sentence. I just habitually hit Ctrl+S pretty much at least once per line.
When I save, it's instantly saved to two hard drives because my writing folders are on a software RAID setup.
Then, usually within a few seconds, my cloud storage (Pcloud for my writing stuff) automatically makes an off-site cloud copy.
Then, once every night, everything gets copied to an external hard drive during my automated backups. This is set up to be addition-only, never removing anything, so files deleted from my main working folders are not deleted from the backup copy.
So I've got 4 copies of everything, not even counting what's stored on Fimfic.
(For most people, the cloud backup alone would probably be fine. I'm just obsessive about it, and I prefer to have recovery copies in-hand locally when I can. But you absolutely should have at least one copy stored securely off-site like a cloud backup. What if your house burned down or burglars stole your computer?)
Oh, hah, yeah... boy, I bet it sure would suck to be working on an entry for a contest, lose about 2000 words to a power outage, and grow so frustrated by the loss that you half-ass the rewrite and it ends up being your lowest scoring entry in said contest. Yeah, that sure would be terrible.
You raise some good points, maybe I should start making my life easier. Thanks for the advice.
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Sorry, it’s just so rare for me to know someone who uses it, and when I tell someone about it they say “What’s Linux?”. Truly, Linux is a very under appreciated OS type that I wish more people would dip their toes in
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Heh, okay ... and that's one more story!
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To be fair, as much as Linux has advanced since the old days, it's still not for everybody.
Your average computer user should never be expected to use the command line, but (apparently, these days) anything that needs root privileges must be done through the command line because anything with root power and a GUI is apparently a huge security risk? Back in my old SuSE days, I could log in to a full GUI interface as root if I wanted to ... or run any GUI window as root. But these days, that's not allowed, at least not in Kubuntu, which forces some things to be done by command line, and there's just no other option. And as awesome as the Linux command line is once you learn how to really use it, it's ludicrous that you're forced to use a 1980's-style user interface for some relatively basic tasks (like setting up automatic backups or installing certain software) in the year 2020.
If you're the kind of computer user who doesn't mind learning how to use the command line and maybe even a bit of programming, Linux is AWESOME! But for the average person who doesn't want to muck about with things 'under the hood', I can definitely see why it wouldn't be well suited to most people.
This pleases me greatly.
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And that’s completely understandable, not everyone would find it very enticing to have to use a terminal to do what normally takes one click to do on a windows pc. What I more meant was I hope that people try it, after all, using tools such as the terminal is not something that has to be feared, it’s just old fashioned. And as far as viruses and things targeted for Linux, they do exist, absolutely, but most viruses that are for Linux are more complex. For example, a virus made for Ubuntu or Debian might not work for a distro of Arch. Plus it is easier to thwart such viruses with the help of the open source nature of Linux based programs, it’s easy for someone in the community to know about how to read complex coding, look at a program and go “That seems really suspicious” and announce it to the community to avoid said program. Yes, Linux does have many flaws such as the inability to use root privileges without the use of the terminal, something that I hope might be able to change.