Moving to Linux
I’m getting there.
Not sure why I’m starting now all of a sudden, but I guess I’m just looking for a change.
For the most part, it’s been a pleasant experience. There was a minor issue with the sound card, but that was really just a bad design on the part of the interface.
I mean really, when you have an interface such as:
Analog Sound/Digital Sound *
And the * in this case is a little light toggle, what does this mean? Does it mean that if the light is on that it’s digital sound or analog sound?
Well, it turns out the light means digital, because when I turned it off, my sound card worked.
Now, before trying this experiment I should have turned them down a little, well, a little below full blast.
And at midnight, I really don’t think I woke a lot of people up. I’m sure people across the river were still sleeping…
Anyway, so far it’s been the usual frustrations and reasons as to why Linux will not win the desktop wars.
Simple things really. I’m not Mr. 100% programmer technical dude. So I really don’t want to have to download source code, try to compile it myself and find that (one at a time) I have to install all these other little dependencies.
I want to download something and have it work.
Especially if this something is just a music player.
So, I’m not using said music player. I’ve found others that came with the system which are just as good, and installed already.
For those interested, I’m using Manderva, since I’ve always used Mandrake, and I’m just to lazy to change.
I might try out Slack since it installed fine on the laptop once. And for me, that’s a big accomplishment.
Right now I’m still duel booting, but I honestly don’t think I will for too much longer.
There are still a few Windows apps that I prefer such as PhotoShop. I just don’t like Gimp. I never really have.
And at the moment I have to pay extra per month if I want to play my Windows games under Linux. I’m actually ok with this, as long as they play just as well in Linux.
All in all, it’s been a good experience.
I have nothing more to add….
Filed under: Blog - @ November 9, 2005 12:58 pm
Check out Ubuntu. It’s the nicest desktop Linux I’ve seen so far. I’m slowly getting around to moving my server over (which isn’t a desktop admittedly, but having apt-get and not being Debian makes it worthwhile.
Speaking of Ubuntu… they’ll give you free disks! I’ve got 5… (It was at a time I didn’t feel like downloading and burning…)
From a support standpoint, I like Debian best (easy to find the “debian way” to do things) and Ubuntu is nice for a focused approach (though it’s a little sparser on widespread support, but better on out of the box hardware support!).
After using apt-get (or Synaptic(?) for that matter) I can’t imagine a niftier software distribution/update system. I suppose BSD works along similar lines (ports?).
{Having said all that, I’m still firmly in the Windows camp… runs kids games and the occassional multimedia app without requiring all sorts of rigmarole.}
Of course there’s also hopes that the Intel Mac things will bear something nifty for non-Apple hardware (however unlikely…)
Anyhow, best of luck!
The right tool for the right job.
My desktop? XP. My file/web/database server? Debian.
I think I’m probably going to go with gentoo on my system. Once it’s installed it’s super easy to install new apps:
type “emerge ” and it goes out looks for the source files, downloads them and any dependencies, and compiles them for your system.
umm.. the comment system buggered the command, it’s: emerge package-name