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Blocklist-Update.sh

Blocklist-Update.sh is a script that I wrote to manage blocklists from bluetack etc to be used in conjunction with Transmission torrent downloader in Linux/MacOS. The script can be taylored to work with Qbittorrent as well, but the placement of the blocklists means you'd have to redirect the blocklist to go somewhere locally manageable as Transmission uses its own blocklist directory in .config. I believe there are about 10 lists there now. It works well for my needs. It can be ran weekly using crontab in standard user profile.  To download:  blocklist-update.sh To download the others:  Github
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DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS PT1

In Linux, there is no right or wrong answer. There are plenty of choices. Don’t like a window manager? Usually you can change that. Don’t like a desktop environment? There is something for everyone. This same amount of choice even bleeds through to the very software applications that you use on a day-to-day basis. Even Windows uses the Aero window manager now, but you don’t really get a choice with that unless you choose to turn off all the visual effects. This will only skim the surface, however, I will cover the multiple choices in desktop environments and window managers in this part one and the upcoming part two of this series. I will briefly explain their strengths and a few of their weaknesses as well.

MATE is a modernized fork of GNOME 2 after the advent of GNOME 3. Much to the shugrin of many Linux users at that time, Gnome 3 has had a consistent history of adding things which didn’t need to be added and stripping out things that should have been kept. Most of GNOME 3 functionality now can be pulled in by the use of extensions, however, this isn’t ideal for all users and so Mate was born. MATE took the best of GNOME 2 and modernized it while still keeping with the traditional look and feel. The hardware usage remained somewhat modest next to GNOME 2 as GNOME 2 itself became deprecated. MATE was so named after a South American tea derived from the Yerba plant(also where the environment originated). In many ways, the resource usage on modern hardware is comparable to that of XFCE, a lightweight and fast alternative desktop environment. Like XFCE, MATE uses 2D compositing via way of Metacity window manager by default.

CINAMMON is a GNOME 3esque desktop environment which was designed and is actively maintained by the Linux Mint developers. It was designed to look and feel more like Windows or what users were most comfortable with. Like GNOME 3, it can be customized with third-party extensions. These extensions are called spices and they have their website. Like with MATE, CINAMMON is a fork meant to carry on with more orthodox computing experiences. CINAMMON makes use of similar compositing technologies as GNOME Shell and thus is not recommended for low-end devices. CINAMMON has been available since Linux Mint 12, however, only became an official release around Linux Mint 13. CINAMMON, like most other desktop environments, is now available for almost all distributions of Linux.

XFCE is a lightweight to midrange desktop environment with a focus on modest hardware requirements and speed. XFCE has a 2D rendering engine and does really well on 512MB and up of RAM. No dedicated graphics card? No problem. XFCE is very customizable and now even has themes to resemble Windows 10. The mascott of XFCE is a mouse. Despite such a light footprint and sturdy 2D rendering, XFCE is still known for its screen tearing issues. Many fixes are online, but none seem to fix this completely. At time of writing, XFCE has a 4.13 release coming along, however, I don’t think it’s in the default Ubuntu repositories just yet. I only noticed it on Manjaro a while back in the unstable branch. For most users, it will be version 4.12. Like GNOME, XFCE offers “goodies” which are extensions to its overall functionality. xfce4-goodies offers a weather applet, task manager, even a cpu graph amongst other things. 2D rendering is offered courtesy of the XFWM4 window manager, but this can be swapped out with Metacity and even Compiz. XFCE was initially released around 1996.

LXDE was designed much for the same reason as XFCE. It was meant to be an even lighter alternative, offering no compositing whatsoever. It advertised itself as being energy efficient. LXDE uses OpenBox for a window manager, is written in the C programming language, and also makes use of gtk toolkit much in the same way as the other environments listed above do. Unlike GNOME and some other environments, LXDE was meant to be modular meaning each application was its own module and wasn’t integrated with other applications in the Desktop. The file-manager “PCManFM” was named after the nickname of the developer who started the LXDE project. LXDE was initially released around 2006.

PANTHEON is another lightweight desktop environment that uses Enlightenment as its compositing window manager. A really good, though not as widely known fork of this environment is known as MOKSHA or the environment commonly used by Bodhi Linux. Like other Linux environments, the PANTHEON desktop environment uses the gtk toolkit along with something called Vala. PANTHEON was designed to be used by Elementary OS which was fork of Ubuntu that was released around 2011.

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