Daily workstation

“A bus station is where a bus stops. 

A train station is where a train stops. 

On my desk, I have a work station….”

For my work and entertainment I use laptop computer. It's a HP Compaq 615, cheap and not so fast notebook today. I have it for 3 years in rather active usage. Initially is was shipped with Windows 7 but about 1,5 years ago I installed Linux Mint as second OS and today it's my almost daily system. Before I have tried Ubuntu and its modifications with lightweight DE (LXDE and XFCE). On Linux Mint I achieved good stability and performance without any serious issues so far. It's 12 LTS version cause I have no need in new unstable features and really don't want to break something - it works very well for me. Also my laptop has old videocard HD Radeon 3200. Proprietary driver doesn't overheat my card and has better performance than open-source but doesn't support new versions of kernel, just up to 3.4.

As laptop screen has 15" screen it's not comfortable for long work. That's why I plug external 20" monitor and keyboard (small and without additional numpad keys) with wireless mouse. So I've got a mobile solution with usual desktop experience. In past I worked primarily on desktop computer in home and it was a pain to switch between two systems with different settings when I was need in notebook.

Unfortunately, on my machine Windows works better than Linux. With Windows I've never had heat or performance issues. But I think that with my current Linux Mint configuration I achieved the same or even better productivity. First of all I threw away Cinnamon and Gnome heavy window managers and replaced with very lightweight tiling manager Awesome WM. I think that if you read this post you're probably familiar with it or even use it (maybe another tiling manager as xmonad or i3). I got very simple, fast, powerful window management and low memory/cpu usage with awesome wm. In total I've spent several months to create config that satisfies me.

Yeah, in awesome wm you can tune so many things to make everyday work easier. I think it was worth it and sometimes it just pure fun to configure your's OS look and feel. In my next post I'll share my awesome wm config with detailed explanations and will start to talk about some tips that I found very useful.