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This document is a quick introduction and walk-through of the NIMBioS working environment, which is based on the Ubuntu 18.04 distribution of Linux. This guide will introduce you to some of the basics of using a NIMBioS workstation.
DO NOT SHUT DOWN, POWER OFF, REBOOT, OR UNPLUG (from neither network nor power) A LINUX WORKSTATION.
Any interruption to the normal operating state of a Linux workstation is unacceptable. In the event that your workstation should become unresponsive or otherwise unusable, the proper response from the user is to seek assistance from the IT staff.
When you first sit down in front of a NIMBioS Linux workstation you will be presented with a login screen that looks like this:
Type in your username in the top box, and your password in the bottom box, and then click “Log In”.
This is what your desktop looks like:
The desktop environment is categorized by three main components: The background, the icons on the desktop, and the panel located at the top of the screen. This layout should be familiar to you from other operating systems.
Working our way around the desktop, starting in the top right corner:
You can log out by clicking on your name in the upper-right corner of the screen, and selecting “Log Out…” from the drop-down menu that appears.
The older Ubuntu desktop looked like this:
The new one looks very different. What happened!?!?
For the last several years Canonical, makers of Ubuntu, had their sights set on carving out a piece of the Internet of Things pie. They wanted to produce Ubuntu phones, tablets, and televisions in addition to servers, workstations, and laptops. And to power it all, they wanted a single, simple, consistent user interface. That's why they created the Unity desktop (pictured above). But now things have changed. Canonical has conceded that between Apple and Android, their target market is pretty much sewn up tight. It just takes way too much effort for far too little return on investment. So Canonical has moved back to doing what they do best: Servers and workstations. (And clouds. Lots of clouds.)
In this transition, Canonical decided to stop spending effort on developing and maintaining a desktop environment when there were already many nice development environments available to choose from. Before their foray into Unity, Ubuntu ran on top of the Gnome desktop. So when they retired Unity, Ubuntu returned to Gnome. But… Gnome has some downsides that I personally don't like. Take a peek at this chart, specifically at the values highlighted in red:
Ubuntu's Unity only used a modest 530MB of RAM. That was one of the nice things about it – it ran smoothly on a wide variety of machines both new and old. Comparatively, Gnome 3 uses nearly an entire gigabyte of RAM, and that's just coming out of the starting gate. Once you start running programs, things get worse. Add to that the lag that comes along with Gnome 3 and user experience starts to dwindle.
Do you have science to do? Do you want to get some work done? Then you probably want to keep that RAM for your own use in things like Matlab, Mathematica, R, etc. I want to get stuff done too! That's why I've chosen to move NIMBioS to Xubuntu's XFCE desktop as the default user desktop. It faster and more responsive, and yet it sips memory more conservatively than the Unity desktop did.