Linux: Week One
Well, it’s officially been one week of a Microsoft-free desktop, and I have to say I seriously don’t see myself going back to Windows. When I get to work and boot up my workstation to that cold, gray desktop, I’m instantly disappointed. I haven’t had this much fun with my computer since my great BeOS experiment, and since Ubuntu has a much more active support community (not to mention individual Linux app support communities), it’s much easier to get my computer to do what I want it to do.
So far, I basically have my computer doing what I did before. The two hardest apps to leave were Photoshop CS2 (it still hurts) and Winamp (I’m learning to deal with it). You’ll notice my “Now Playing” hasn’t changed for a week because I’ve been too lazy to get a script running that reads the song currently playing in XMMS, and the Winamp install keeps crashing under WINE, and I’m not sure why. WINE is going to be my savior as I can theoretically run both Winamp and Photoshop 7. I haven’t had any luck PROVING this theory so far, but I also haven’t had much time because we are swamped at work.
Aside from those two, I haven’t had much trouble adjusting. Most of the programs I was using in Windows were open source and (obviously) available in Linux, so I wasn’t super alienated. My desktop is completely configurable, and I’m barely skimmed the surface of customizability. I have basically installed and tweaked a couple window manager/icon/interface themes, edited my menus, added some functionality to my panels, and that’s about it. I have also just barely skimmed the surface of the depth of the Linux command line. It’s extremely powerful and could take years to master. Also, I don’t really have to worry about what I’m doing in the command line unless I’m sudo-ing commands, so I’m free to mess around without worrying about annihilating my system.
My gripes with the OS so far are minimal, and 9 times out of 10 are just a result of me still “thinking in Windows”. Multiple, virtual desktops are a fairly new concept to me, and I’m just now getting used to giving applications their own desktop and leaving them running. I like to keep the Gimp open on its own desktop, and Firefox and Thunderbird get their own desktops most of the time.
Linux has come a long way as far as “just working” right out of the box (only five years ago I was manually editing xconf files to get a GUI), but it’s not all perfect yet. While sound worked, sound did NOT work in my movie application. It took me a while to figure it out, and honestly I don’t remember what finally got it going. I also never got it working in VLC, my media player of choice, so had to install a package of codecs, which is unnecessary in VLC. I’m currently using Totem for my movie playing capabilities, and just 30 minutes ago got DVD playback up and running. It also took some finagling to get sound working in Flash movies in Firefox (Linux audio is a strange creature…), and though sound works in every application I need it to now, sounds can not come from multiple sources at once (for example, sound will not play in a flash movie in my browser if I am listening to MP3s). Of course, given enough Googling, this problem can be solved as well. After getting correct nVidia drivers installed, a Bit Torrent client going, and a couple other things, all major functionality is intact, save for TV out. This is a project for tomorrow.
Of course, the biggest gripe is the lack of Photoshop, which I have spent years learning. The Gimp is an excellent program, and I love open source software and try to support it when I can, but Photoshop is just too damn good. I did install a Gimp hack called “Gimpshop” that switches menus around so that the Gimp interface is almost identical to Photoshop’s, but was disappointed to see that it does not make it a single-window app, nor does it come with keyboard mappings (to match Photoshop shortcuts…a must-have). I will have to manually edit my shortcuts, and I continue to find features the Gimp does not have, as well as things that are much easier to do in Photoshop. To practice, I opened a photo I was never really happy with and decided to see what I could do with it. After about an hour, I had the photo basically corrected to the point I wanted, but it took a lot of Googling, and a lot of trial and error. Even now that I know how to do it, I don’t think I can perform my basic photo retouching as efficiently or effectively in the Gimp, so my quest to WINE Photoshop continues.
Speaking of programs, the days of compiling from source are all but dead in Linux (though I think it would be a valuable task to learn), and installing new software couldn’t be easier. For the most part, I open my package manager, search for the program I want to install, check it, and hit apply. The packages are downloaded and installed, and it literally takes 3 clicks. I do the reverse to uninstall a program. If I know the name of a package, it is just a little faster to apt-get it in the command line, though I rarely know a program by the package name.
The only remaining remnants of my Windows install are two NTFS formatted hard drives (which are file storage only: MP3s, ROMs, movies, TV shows, etc etc, which I have automounted as Windows and Windows2. This is a sloppy, temporary fix, as Linux cannot write to NTFS drives (not reliably, anyway), so I cannot modify any of these files. At the time of my install, however, I didn’t have a place to stick 400gbs of random crap while I reformatted these drives. I will either have to invest in another hard drive to transfer this stuff to, format the original drives, then transfer back, or I will just buy a huge drive, format it, and transfer all that stuff onto it for good. Either way, it’s clear that storage is once again becoming an issue for me, and I have vague plans for a dedicated file server brewing in my head.
A couple annoyances aside, I have to say that I am a Linux user now, and have fully dedicated myself to becoming proficient in the OS. That doesn’t mean I will never log into a Windows system ever again; my laptop hates every flavor of Linux I’ve thrown at it, and would require a HUGE time investment to get working correctly, and I (of course) deal with 99% Windows at work, and still continue to learn new things about it every day. I just feel much more comfortable in a truly FREE operating system on my primary home computer.
January 12th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
You must come back to the dark side x, DO NOT GO TOWARDS THE LIGHT……zaaapppp
damn
too late.