coding

How good is Pop!_OS in 2020?

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I have been using MX_linux, and while I think the premise behind it is good, the implementation falls a bit flat. As someone that has used Linux for years, I was avoiding using my small and light laptop because I did not want to deal with the system that was running it. That is not a good sign.

So, I decided that I was going to install a new Linux distro on my system and get back to writing and doing things. Out of curiosity I dropped in to distrowatch to see what the flavor of the month was currently. To my surprise I saw MX_Linux on the top. After the issues I have had with it, that was interesting to see. But, sitting at spot number 5 was Pop!_OS. Huh? I had heard of it, but thought that is was some simplified version for kids. I was wrong.

What is Pop!_OS?

It turns out that Pop!_OS is an operating system based on Ubuntu by the folks over at system76 . System76 make Linux computers, laptops, and servers, and at one point used Ubuntu. But, do to some sort of falling out, they made their own distro based on Ubuntu. And, that is how we got Pop!_OS.

Enough of the history lesson.

How do I think it stacks up? So far, I am liking it. The desktop is running Gnome3. It has been a year or 4 since I used Gnome as my main desktop windowing system. For a while, I have been using XFCE, Mate, or Cinnamon. And, while all of those are perfectly good GUIs, I like the way that Pop!_OS has set it up. Either that, or I just like Gnome 3. It is a completely different experience than you get with other systems.

Initial Thoughts on Pop!_OS

How does the system work on my laptop? There was 1 issue that I had to fix right away. On my laptop, the screen brightness was cycling through the various brightness settings. This is due to battery life help and auto brightness control. That can be changed in the settings panel, and after I did that, life got immensely better. (Having your screen change brightness constantly will make you go insane. Trust me on this one.) The next thing that I did was change the touchpad to not click on tap. While it was not overly sensitive, I have heavy hands, and always turn this off.

The next part comes down to typing. I like to write this blog and to do some coding on the side. With MX_linux I had to disable the touchpad for 1 sec after typing so that the location of the mouse would not cause my jumping to go to where the pointer is. This is a serious distraction when attempting to write code or to write just about anything. My experience on Pop!_OS has been great. I have been typing my thoughts about Pop!_OS for that last little bit, and have not had any issues. That is a huge plus.

But, what about when you close the lid on your laptop, and power settings? All of that worked out of the box. with MX_linux, I fought with it continually. With Pop!_OS I did not have to make a single change. By default I believe it suspends when you close the lid. It has not frozen at all on wake up, and the experience has been great.

Installing New Software

Pop_OS! comes with the Pop!_Shop. This “shop” has a very large set of applications that are available for installation. Below is an image of what it looks like when you launch it.

From the Pop!_Shop it was easy to get other applications installed. I was quickly able to install Spotify, and it has links for Chromium (open source version of Chrome), Atom, Steam, and a slew of others. Also, it automatically checks for updates, and prompts you to install them.

It was a nice change of pace not having to add additional repositories in order to install some common applications. I use Visual Studio Code for dev work on Linux, and even it was there and easy to install, just make sure to use the .deb version.

If you do not want to use the Pop!_Shop, you can always fall back to the command line. That is my default for much of way that I run my system, and since Pop! is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, apt and aptitude still work. Note, you will need to install aptitude if you want to be able to use it.

In case you are interested, below is a short list of preinstalled software:

  • Python3
  • Firefox
  • Git
  • LibreOffice

Configuring Gnome 3 Keyboard Shortcuts

For me the biggest switch was moving back to gnome and enabling keyboard shortcuts, or finding out what the keyboard shortcuts are. This has more to do with me wanting as many shortcuts as possible. Others don’t mind clicking the mouse to switch screens, but that is not the way that I like to work. So, I will share the settings that I use.

In Gnome 3 there are virtual workspaces that are located up and down from the main display. You can hit the Windows/Special/Power key and it will display on the right I prefer to quickly jump between workspaces by using the keyboard. So in order to do that you need to do the following.

  1. Super + / –> enter “Settings” (this will open the settings menu)
  2. Find “Keyboard” in the left hand menu
  3. Click customize shortcuts
  4. Choose navigation
  5. From there I add shortcuts for moving windows between workspaces and being able to jump between workspaces.

Doing this gets the system to the point that I can use it without worry. Well, without wanting to throw it out the window. By default alt+tab will switch between windows on all workspaces. This is a benefit as, I have had to fight with other systems to get that functionality to work. Don’t get me started about windows.

Overall Opinion on Pop!_OS

After using Pop!_OS for just a short period of time, I think I am going to stick with it. The system has been easy to use and configure. It just gets out of the way so that I can get my work done. To be honest, I wish that I would have found it sooner. For me, it just works. Yes, I am a power user, but that is all good.

Even running Gnome3 on a 3 year old machine with 8 gigs of ram is fine. I will admit that I would be hard pressed to run any virtual machines on this, but for being able to build and run apps it is fine.

Another item that I like is that I did not have to fiddle with different system settings and repos to get base functionality. I have spent hours trying to get Fedora configured properly, and that is just a waste of time for me at this point.

If you are interested, I think you should give it a try.

Trying to Help Other Learn Programming

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Having worked in the industry for a very long time, sometimes I forget how much I have learned (and forgotten) over the years. What seems trivial now, was once a complex idea that I had to wrap my head around, and after learning the fundamentals, there always seemed to be more to learn. This was at, in my mind, a golden age for learning computer systems and how to code. Installing Linux was not what it is today with flashing installers and disk configurators. Heck, X-windows did not start by default and you had to fiddle with configuration setting for ages to get a gui environment up to work in.

Now, I am not saying that we should return to the days of old, but it brings to mind that learning some of the core fundamentals is not something you get just by trying to get a system up. You have to go through different programs, and make the decision to move forward with learning the command line, and system fundamentals. And, with all the coding boot camps and quick starts, on occasion I am amazed anyone can find a good point to start.

That being said, I have been asked by some people that I know to help the gain a better understanding of the fundamentals of programming. There was the direct request to learn using python.

Python is a flexible language that you can do most anything in. And by anything, I mean almost anything. I started using it because it was a language that was available on Solaris that a co-worker did not want to use, and we at first did not want him on the project. My understanding, and knowledge of Python has changed a lot in the 8+ years since we decided to use Python for an internal company project.

That being said, it is a multi-disciplinary language. It is used for web development, system administration, machine learning, scientific studies…. In addition to this, other than the strange white spacing it uses to know what is going on, it provides a decent starting point to begin working with other languages. I have to admit, if you want to learn the true ins and outs of programming at a system level, Python will not get you there. For that you will need to dust off some books on C/C++. Although, I have heard that Rust is starting to replace some of that. Out of scope.

Back to Python and getting started.

I wanted to find a resource that would cover a broad range of topics when it came to Python, and also provided real world examples. When I was in college we spent a year going through a book on C++. That was difficult for the students, and many of them we lost along the way. And, after that year, I could not really write anything that would produce something that I could show to anybody. If it were not for the money I was forking out for college, I might have said what is the point.

After some quick searches, I chose a book to use. I decided to go with Python Crash Course, 2nd Edition: A Hands-On, Project-Based Introduction to Programming. (FYI) I don’t get any money if you use that link. The reason I chose this book because it has you actually do something that you can see results from.

Over the course of the book, you will work on 3 projects. I am sure they are not the most advanced projects, but they provide a foundation from which you can then launch your own projects from.

  • A video game utilizing Pygame
  • A Data analysis program with Visualization
  • A Web Application based off of Django

For a lot of developers, that is some great basics to cover. True, it does not cover writing a serverless application on AWS with Lambda and API Gateway, but, it goes about teaching a person how to think about an idea and implement it.

Note: This is all speculation. I am working through the book now with 2 people, but wanted to track my experience with it as I went through. But, I think one of the key factors is working through the entire book, and not skipping. The reason I say this is because I know a number of self taught developers that while excellent at writing code, do not know how to communicate their ideas with others.

Hopefully, by working through a book like this, it will teach enough of the fundamentals and language so that both of the people I am working with will be able to advance their careers.

Should I stop work on CfnMason or any project?

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Off and on for years, and at various companies, I have developed various tools to manage complex AWS CloudFormation templates and stacks. This came out of the lack of tooling that was associated with CloudFormation itself. It was not that CFN was bad, (it is notoriously picky) it is just that it was designed with the intention of being a way to treat your infrastructure in code based manner. That is really not true. CFN was created as a templating language with defined spec.

Because of these limitations, I have built closed and open source solutions to manage the complexities that involve working with CloudFormation. Recently I even started revamping a tool that I wrote years ago to manage complex CloudFormation Stacks. This update was done on the behest of a few people that actually utilize the tool and wanted to be taken from the messy state it is currently in, into something that could be tied into their current applications. It was from this that I began working on CfnMason as a python module.

However, recently I started working with CDK. CDK is Am,azon’s CloudFormation Development Kit. My first thought was that it was going to be horrible, and why would anyone ever use it. Now, this was before it was a fully supported implementation and was only really viable when used with JavaScript. And, don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate JS, but I do most of my coding in Python these days. So, when I finally had a chance to use it for work, I found that I really like it, and that it was actually an excellent tool.

So, that brings me back to the original question. How do I know when it is time to stop working on a project? The main answer in my mind is you have to figure out that for yourself. When I started writing this, I was pretty sure that I was going to say that I am no longer going to be working on updating CfnMason. But, as I wrote this, I realized that not everyone is going to be able to move over to CDK. There are probably thousands of CFN stacks that have been created over the years, that require updates and tweaks, that are not a good fit to move over to CDK. As of yet, I don’t know of a way to take a template that is in AWS and convert it into a working CDK script so that you can develop on it from there.

This is why writing is sometimes the best way to find an answer to a problem, even technical ones. At face value, there are a number of projects that seem like they should just be discarded and never used again. But, once you analyze the situation properly, you might realize that there is a reason to move forward with development of a seemingly dead solution. It might even be to use it as a growth platform. Or, it could be that while there are new tools available, that for some, older and simpler tools are also still needed.

So, at the end of the day, what started as a note to say that I am no longer going to be working on CfnMason, has been turned around to me stating that I am going to try and get it done. Ha, yeah, even I laughed at that. Although now that the nation is in lock down, there is more of a chance that I might get it finished.

How to configure environment for Python Poetry based project.

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How do I get started?

I recently switched over to Poetry as a package manager for my project CfnMason. ( CfnMason is a tool related to CloudFormation stack management, but you can read about that on the Readme as it is updated. ) The question is, how do you use Poetry when you are working on a project across multiple machines and operating systems. I guess I am going to attempt to address the issue.

So, you want to join a project, or work on a project that is using the Poetry dependency management tool. Great! But, how do you get the requirements setup for the project so that you can start working on it? How do you know which version of Python to use, which packages to install, how to build the project, or how to run the test suite?

This is an issue that I was facing, but it was not with another project, but my own as I was switching between machines. Now, I do know some of the answers to the questions above, but I was still stuck as to how to setup a project on another machine. As such, I decided to walk through the process of coming onto a new project and determining how to work with it. The project that will be used for this walk-through will be CfMason, at tool that manages some aspects of building and deploying CloudFormation stacks on AWS.

Hopefully the project that you are working on has a Readme file. Though, to be fair, documentation is hard, and is often the last thing that is added to a project. If it does, you should be able them, but if they are not provided, then the following steps are the way that I would go about working on a project that uses Poetry for dependency management. Oh, and as a note. I am making the assumption that you already have Poetry installed.

Steps to work on Poetry based Project

  1. Determine that the project is using Poetry
  2. Check the version of Python that is needed
    1. Validate local Python version
    2. Install if missing
  3. Create a virtual environment for building the application
    1. venv — for packaging and validation
    2. venvdev — for building the package
  4. Install project dependencies
  5. Build the project
  6. Run tests

Determine the project is using Poetry.

If the ReadMe does not tell you that the project is using poetry, then there is a quick way to find out.

  • Look for the file pyproject.toml in the base of the project.
  • Open the file and look for the following line
    • [tool.poetry]

Provided you are able to find this file, and line, then the project is using Poetry.

Determine the version of Python

One nice thing about Poetry is that it has a defined location to identify the version of Python. I am a big fan of this, as the difference between different versions can cause major problems. Take for example that reserved keywords changed a bunch between 3.6 and 3.7. The steps to follow are as follows.

  • Open the toml project file pyproject.toml
  • Find the supported python versions in the [tool.poetry.dependencies]
  • Find the line starting with python, and find the supported versions.
    • Ex. python = "^3.6"
  • If you don’t have that version of Python on your system, install it.

Setting up a local Virtual Env

I am a huge proponent of using a virtual environment for each application that I am working on. In some cases, I will have 2, one for including all the development modules, and one for just the ones needed for the application to run. Since Python 2 is pretty much EOL, I am not going to spend any time on how to setup a virtual environment for Python2. Instead, this is all dedicated to Python3. And I can only guarantee this on Python 3.6 or later.

foo$ python -m venv venv-dev
foo$ python -m venv venv
foo$ ls -ld venv*
drwxr-xr-x 1 foobar 197610 0 Nov 24 17:02 venv/
drwxr-xr-x 1 foobar 197610 0 Dec 25 14:19 venv-dev/

Install project dependencies

For this last part, you need to activate either of the Python Virtual Environments and then run the install code from there. This is only if you really want to install it both ways. If not, then you can just create a single virtual env directory and just install all the dependencies.

Install all the dependencies, even the ones needed for development.

foo$ poetry install
Installing dependencies from lock file


Package operations: 10 installs, 0 updates, 0 removals

  - Installing more-itertools (7.2.0)
  - Installing zipp (0.6.0)
.....
  - Installing cfnmason (0.1.0)

The other option is to just install the libraries needed to execute and run the module. I would almost prefer if it defaulted to the method below, but it works. 

foo$ poetry install --no-dev
Installing dependencies from lock file

Nothing to install or update

  - Installing cfnmason (0.1.0)

Start working on the Project

That is it. You should be up and running. At least to the point where you can get started with the project. Moving forward from this point will rely a lot upon how the project is setup, and how well it is documented. But, the big factor is that you can now start working on it while using Poetry, or you have the foundation to work on a project across multiple machines.

How do I setup a new python project?

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Python prides itself on there only being one best way of doing things. However, if you have ever had the desire to create a package that can be distributed in python, then you may have run into some frustration. Out of the box, there does not appear to be a single clear concise way of creating a new project. After hearing over and over again, that the correct way in Python should be obvious, in this area, it seems that this is definitely not the case.

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

— Zen of Python

However, it does seem that there are a couple of solutions that have been put forward to solve this problem, and none of them have officially been endorsed by the people that manage Python. You can do it all by hand, and I give you credit if you do, but this is more work than I want to keep up with. I started to walk through the documentation to use setuptools to configure a package, and almost wanted to cry. Not really, but when you cannot give a clean concise way to build and distribute a python package, there is a problem.

The only thing that is clear is that you should have a setup.py file. Other than that, you are on your own. As I said before, the documentation from setuptools is laughable. Maybe if I did not mind reading pages upon pages to get a simple package started I would be OK, but I don’t have the patience for it. I thought that it would make sense to look at existing packages, but once again, everybody seems to setup their projects differently. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with developers taking their own routes to setup a package, especially after seeing how little guidance there is. Maybe packaging was an afterthought for Python.

Having used Ruby in the past, I was sure that there had to be packages out there to assist in setting up the initial package structure and environment. Now, I do not expect it to write the code for me, but the basics of what is in the package, file layout, author information, etc. And after a bit of searching and head scratching I finally found what I was looking for. Well, at least I got a bit further down the rabbit hole. I had honestly thought that by this point I would be working on migrating my app from Ruby to Python, not trying to figure out how to create a package.

What tools are there?

It seems that upon first glance, the top three tools for creating Python packages are Poetry, Pipenv, and Hatch. And when I say creating, I mean creation and management of the packages. There is always doing it by hand, and maybe I will end up there, but that goes against the grain of automation.

I have spent a bit of time looking at these three options, plus managing it by hand. After looking at it for a bit, I think that I am going to throw Pipenv out the window. The lack of proper documentation is a stopping point for me. Also, it seems like there is a fork that is now responsible for the actual development, and not the original source itself.

That leaves me with Hatch and Poetry. Decisions, decisions, decisions. I am not sure which route I am going to go down.

Which one do you choose?

I think that I am going to start by creating my project using both methods. Early on, it should be simple enough to create the source and copy it between projects. The real question will be, which one will make management easier in the long run. That means, in my next post, I am going to start building, or more accurately, rebuilding cfmason.

Within a week or two I should be able to make my decision. But, I am going to build them out from scratch both ways, and record the process. Heck, that will probably be harder than the coding itself. Documenting this stuff is not easy.

See you in a week.