Title: The Setup / Neale Pickett After reading [Russ Cox's setup](http://russ.cox.usesthis.com/) I thought it might be interesting to write up my own. 29 December, 2015 Who are you, and what do you do? -------------------------------- I am a system administrater at Canonical (the people who make Ubuntu). Mostly I hack around the periphery of free software projects, occasionally tossing patches to projects that capture my interest. A partial portfolio is on my [source code page](src/). I also do computer security training for middle and high school kids, college students, and professionals. You can read about that at [dirtbags](http://dirtbags.net/). My hobbies include being a (laid back) disc jockey, and fiddling around with microcontrollers. Hardware -------- I've decided to be very energy conscious. This means my hardware is low-power and not high-performance. I use a Thinkpad X220. My wife uses a Chromebook from 2011, which she loves, and my daughter has an X220 that she doesn't turn on much. We have a brother printer that connects wirelessly and speakes Google Cloud Print. I can no longer print natively from Linux, which has mattered exactly once in the last two years. The family shares a Nexus 7 tablet, my wife and daughter have Nexus 5x phones, and I have a Nexus 6. We also have a Chromecast that's mostly used for Netflix, and a Wii. Software -------- I run Ubuntu with the Gnome 3 desktop, which is the first Linux desktop environment I actually like. I think this is mostly because it doesn't try to do many tricks. Inside Emacs I run Gnus for work email, and a comint-mode derivative I created for bouncing around work machines with SSH. I don't run any sort of terminal emulator: everything is `TERM=dumb` inside my emacs SSH sessions. My other main program is Google Chrome. Occasionally I will run Gimp and Inkscape, too. What would be your dream setup? ------------------------------- I'm pretty happy with what I have now, although I wish I had time to get Acme working for me as nicely as Emacs, since I am not an Emacs fan. It bothers me that X11 is such a horrible mess, but now that I'm not maintaining my own window manager, it's less of an issue. I'd like to get my daughter off her X220 and onto a Chromebook, because I feel like desktop system administration is a skill she will never need as an adult. But it's not enough of a concern to make me actually do anything about it.