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Making the switch-01: My journey from Windows to Linux

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Darwin:
Thanks for the pointer about DOPus, urlwolf. I've been casting about for a decent File Manager for Linux and have so far been disappointed. I was looking at WINE the other day and wondering if I should install it and see if ArcGIS will run under it. If DOpus will as well...  :-*

zridling:
edbro, I don't think Quicken will ever do that, or need to, unless some market research shows there's money to be made, much like Adobe won't write (or port) a version of Photoshop. Just not enough users to justify the ROI. For myself, I'd kill for AutoHotkey (not the weak substitutes); UltraEdit damnit!; NewsLeecher; and XYplorer. I'll eventually get around to testing a few apps under WINE or their Linux versions. I know that Opera works just the same as under Windows, and the same skins are used, so I was able to make it look exactly like it is in Vista.

But the reality is that under GNU/Linux, either the (free) software is different (cf. KM/GMPlayer and VLC vs. GomPlayer for me), or the Windows version is mature, as in commercial software. This is the same reason I often laugh at the mac folks. When I look at software on my friends' macs, yea, it's all polished, but most of the apps seem unfinished or they make you work in very different ways. I think someone else mentioned in another thread that the one great contribution of Windows in the early 90s (and then especially with Win95) is UI consistency. GNU/Linux doesn't have that because you can not only choose among half a dozen different desktop environments, but you can customize each far more than I ever dreamed in Windows. Great if you got time to futz around with it; however, I don't.

urlwolf:
hmm Zaine, am I feeling the vibration that you are starting to realize that linux will take away much of your precious little time just fiddling around to get some functionality that is standard in your windows box?

:)

Darwin:
urlwolf - I read you previous post in haste; I now realise that DOpus is not likely to run well under wine. Of course, I have to try it now! I'm also going to see what happens with XYPlorer - because that would be a HUGE improvement over anything I've yet seen in linux.

zridling:
[URLWOLF]: you are starting to realize that linux will take away much of your precious little time just fiddling around to get some functionality that is standard in your windows box?
--- End quote ---
You nailed it! Don't forget that GNU/Linux was created by geeks of geeks and for geeks. Therefore, tweaking is allowed and encouraged. You can tweak everything from the UI to the source code, of course. I think that's the attraction of distributions ("distros") like PCLinuxOS — once it's installed and loaded, you sit back and go 'Wow, this looks good," or at least much better than I expected. Same for Fedora_7, where the artwork and graphics are really cool. SMALL POINT. In PCLinuxOS(?) or maybe it's KDE UI, you can set a navy logon screen that looks like a gray hand coming out of the darkness and pressing itself against your monitor's screen to verify your logon username and password instead of a traditional boot screen, and as it does so it pulses. Again, it's only eye candy, but it makes you say freakin' cool.

Darwin, please report back and tell us what you found. I suspect that WINE will run only the simpler Windows apps well, and something as complex as DOpus is going to suffer. But yea, I even wrote to Donald Lessau and asked: "If I won the lottery tomorrow, could I pay you to hire a staff and start writing a Linux version of XYplorer?" He said anything could happen (with enough cash set aside) — ha!! However, I figure it takes enough time to code a Windows program, much less a GNU/Linux one (Michael Rainey knows about this).

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