We recently interviewed Khaled Monsoor on how he uses Fedora. This is part of a series that profiles Fedora users and how they use Fedora to get things done. Contact us on the feedback form to tell of us about someone you think we should interview, or to express interest in being interviewed.

Who is Khaled Monsoor?

Khaled Monsoor was born and raised in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. After graduating with a degree in computer science and engineering, he worked in several different business sectors. Monsoor started a masters in Bioinformatics, but decided to not pursue it.

Monsoor currently works at Augmedix Inc., a Silicon Valley medicare startup, as a research engineer. started using Linux in 2002 and got involved with the Fedora Project in 2005. He believes balancing the demands of a full-time job and family is the biggest challenge to contributing to open source projects.

His heroes are the Thundercats, Captain Planet and MacGyver. Khaled’s favorite movies are The Matrix and Interstellar. “During my youth, The Matrix [shook] my whole concept of reality. Is what we see and feel really real, or just sort of simulation or just a test? That sort of thing. In Interstellar, it’s the twisted human lives with advanced technology mesmerized me. I think the father in me cried, like a baby, with Matthew McConaughey in the hospital meeting scene.”

Monsoor also enjoys photography. He like to use his Nikon D7100, but admits the best camera is the one you have on hand. “I like magnificent nature pictures that takes me to that place, travel & street pictures of same spirit, and honest portraits that makes a close feelings of that person’s real life.”

More of Monsoor’s photos can be found on his Flickr page.

The Fedora Community

Monsoor’s first interaction with the Fedora Community left him impressed with its energy and passion about aesthetics. While there are many Linux distributions to choose from, he chose Fedora due to its “system stability, community support and Konsole terminal.” He would like to see more attention paid to Fedora’s overall visual aesthetics.

What Hardware?

For work, Monsoor uses Fedora 27 on an HP Probook 470 G3 laptop. The laptop is equipped with an Intel Core i7-6500U Processor and 16 GB RAM. It has a hybrid graphics solution utilizing Intel and AMD GPUs. The hybrid graphics is not very useful due to driver issues in Linux. Monsoor replaced the 500GB hard drive with a 128GB SSD drive to boost performance. “The big 17″ display is a huge plus for software development.”

Monsoor has repetitive pain injury (RSI) pain in his wrists so he uses a special mouse. “I use an Anker vertical wireless mouse to ease the stress on my wrist.”

What Software?

Monsoor prefers KDE Plasma for his desktop. He also makes use of Kate, Konsole, Kalc, Dolphin file manager and Kdenlive. For non-KDE software he uses Gimp, Pinta, Shotwell, Hyper Terminal, VS Code, PostgreSQL, Firefox and Libre Office.

When asked about why he prefers KDE he said, “I’m not sure, exactly. Possibly, it gives me a feeling of control. In charge of something very capable, waiting for directions and just works. Not forced over-simplistic, or trying to hide the complexities it handles, rather gives a grip on them. Or, just that its name begins with the same character (K) as my name.”

He prefers Konsole because “it shares the philosophy of KDE. Stable, capable and highly-configurable, just what power users needs. Not too dumb-looking, not too nerdy.”