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

[zridling]

urlwolf gave me a good idea to document my switch from Windows to GNU/Linux. If you decide to read this ongoing series, it was his idea from the start. I've wanted to "make the switch" since 1998 when Corel came out with its own version of Linux. That lasted about two weeks before I shelved that junk. In the meantime, I've toyed with various Linux distros, but knew I was never going to switch, so at best it was a convenient distraction. I'm no expert, so I'll be learning as this series unfolds. So if you ask me a question, I'll probably just google it, since I'm not that smart.

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[Dirhael]

I think the main reason I never quite manged to switch over to *nix is the font rendering. No matter what distro or what settings I use, they never feel or look quite right compared to Windows or OSX. Secondly, it's the issue of multimedia. GNU Linux has a lot of amazing music and video players, but some codecs are not as fast as some of the Windows alternatives (mainly a problem with h.264 HD content), and getting 5.1 surround sound setup correctly is a pain in the back end if you don't have just the right sound card. I'm hoping that KDE 4 will be the solution for me, as it will come with a brand new audio interface. If they get that one right, and also solves some of the font issues (though that's more of a X issue) I might be tempted to switch over full-time.

[urlwolf]

This sounds like a really promising series of posts.
A software-guru, who knows the current windows landscape and has a website with the best picks I've ever seen, has the balls to leave all that behind.

Me, I'm impressed that you actually want to start from scratch trying to find the best software for your needs yet again. I can imagine how many hours you have invested in finding it. And I'm not even talking about the price of the licenses you own (time is more important than money).

Best of luck!

[zridling]

Dirhael, fonts are always an issue and to my surprise, as are graphics. Yea, that may be shallow, but appearance makes a difference, just ask an mac user. A lot of people I know skin the crap out of Windows. KDE is more like Windows; Gnome is more like Mac, it seems.

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[cnewtonne]

This is amazing stuff and certainly an eye opener. My faith in the concept and the drive is certainly there but i have to admit, not as immense to really make me do this switch for my personal productivity. I run linux on all my server machines at work and will always do.
Thank you for sharing these insightful thoughts with us.

[Darwin]

One thing that has impressed my about OpenOffice.org Impress  under Ubuntu is that the font rendering is nice and crisp. Under Windows StarOffice 8's Impress fails to impress because the font rendering sucks.

[Darwin]

The good news is that there are a few apps I can take with me right away:
— WinRAR

Cool - I'm still casting about for linux analogues/versions of Windows apps that I love. However, what impresses me most about Linux in 2007 is that if I were a student with a brand new laptop and a huge, blank harddrive, I could install a Linux distro like ubuntu and be productive right off the bat - OpenOffice has everything a first year student needs - and on the internet in the blink of an eye (probably more important to an undergrad than productivity - hell, it's more important to me!).

I'm on a journey similar to Zaine's - I'm seriously considering making my next computer purchase a Linux only machine. I've been playing with ubuntu courtesy of Carl (cthorpe) and his mini-review of wubi.

[steeladept]

I too have been on this journey for a while.  I personally like Mint Linux.  It is a spinoff of Ubuntu, but has access to a larger database of drivers out of the box (so to speak) since it also has some proprietary drivers.  They also have rendered a version of the SLED SLAB interface, which is nice as well.  They just released version 3.0 (Cassandra) and are working on a KDE version of Cassandra due out in the near future.

[edbro]

As soon as Intuit releases Quicken for Linux I will switch. Until that time........

Yes, I know there are similar programs in Linux but none that I've seen can touch Quicken. Specifically, I like Quicken's ability to update all my accounts daily from the web at the press of a single button.

[urlwolf]

How about file manages (dopus)?
THere was a post in the dopus forum of one user running dopus using wine and being completely usable. (!). Maybe you could try it?

THere is another thread making Foobar work under wine here.

The problem is that some good apps in win do suck when ported to linux (maybe devs cannot pay enough attention as the market is not as big). Finding these and making a list would be good. How is opera under linux? And SFFS?

[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?

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).

[zridling]

Darwin, I'll talk about this in a later post, but there are some "Windows equivalent" software sites like these two around:

http://www.linuxalt.com/
http://www.linuxrsp.ru/win-lin-soft/table-eng.html

They will be a big help when I get to that point. I'll post 'Part 2' later tonight or by Friday morning and link to it in the top post here.

[Darwin]

Thanks Zaine. I've shied away from trying out DOpus under Wine because I want to make sure that their licensing policy will allow me to do it first and because I haven't read anything anywhere that indicates that it works! So far I've only loaded up EditPad Pro in Wine and it works, so far. The cursor has a stamp sized patch of black surrounding it until you change the colour scheme to white text on a black background. I'm tempted to try uedit as well, but none of these are priorities. As I noted in an earlier post, above, what seriously impresses me about Linux circa 2007 is that it's really pretty much load it and forget it. It's all there out of the box - e-mail, internet browser, office suite, CD/DVD authoring tools, musc and other media players and editors, graphics packages... the list goes on. DOpus or XYPlorer on Linux would be nice, but it's not a deal breaker for me. I'm sort of excited about finding Linux apps (I'm probably just feeding my software addiction!).

Anyway, I'll check out those links and will report back if and when I take a run at loading anything major under Wine. Thanks for starting the thread, Zaine - this is going to be interesting!

[edbro]

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.

Never say never. They have already taken the first step:

Intuit takes QuickBooks Enterprise to Linux

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5374

[PhilB66]

apc recently published a superguide (22-10-2007): The Open Source Challenge. How to replace Windows completely with Ubuntu.