Switching to Linux, you're doing it wrong(joshtronic.com)
joshtronic.com
Switching to Linux, you're doing it wrong
http://joshtronic.com/2011/04/switching-to-linux-youre-doing-it-wrong
6 comments
This is a small point, but regarding Ableton Live not having an analog on Linux: anyone who wants to do pro audio editing on Linux needs to try Ardour. It's a fantastic project that represents the best of the open-source tradition, and it is in constant and active development. Right now it's better than it's ever been. It's not always simple to get it running on Ubuntu, but it is well worth it; while Ableton Live might have some performance perks that few other DAWs have, in terms of strict potential for pro audio engineering Ardour matches it on every point.
Very true, Ardour is fantasic for a ProTools-like application. For me, Ableton Live has a great workflow for demoing songs quickly. Just to not act like I'm better than what I wrote on my blog - I'm also set in my ways and unable to adapt / unwilling to make it work ;)
What you probably meant to say is "I'm so old and decrepit
that I can't learn new things so I can't acclimate to an
environment without some shitty Adobe or Microsoft application".
Don't get me wrong, there are some pieces of software that just
don't have an equivalent for Linux (*cough* Ableton Live *cough*)
Photoshop is superior in comparison to Gimp, agreed. But don't get started with Microsoft Office. If you want to beautiful typesetting, a simple LaTeX environment would suffice and plenty are available on Linux.
Beautiful typesetting isn't what people are looking for when they use Office. They are looking for a program that will read that god-awful .doc file that their coworker created.
OpenOffice is great, but it fails way too often at this task.
OpenOffice is great, but it fails way too often at this task.
It's more than that. LaTeX is great when I have already produced a document that says exactly what I want it to say, and now I am trying to find the way to turn that into the best looking print or PDF that I can.
LaTeX doesn't do anything to help me figure out what to say.
For word processing, OpenOffice is pretty good. It's biggest failing compared to Word is a lack of a good organizational tool. It has some kind of "navigator" mode that has occasionally been offered as the answer for people who miss Word's outline view, but it doesn't compare. A few years ago, there was a post on the OO developer forums where a major OO developer acknowledged that this was a serious lack, and said it was on the roadmap. However, it would require a lot of chances so we were not to expect it soon. When that gets in, OO will be a lot more useful.
For spreadsheets, the gap is larger, and OO is behind not only at the high end (which is arguably not too critical--most people aren't using anywhere near the full power of Excel) but also has too many annoyances for casual use.
For example, on my gaming PC I wanted to use a spreadsheet to keep track of data on my sales from the auction house in Warhammer Online. When adding the data for a new auction, I needed to enter the date and time into a cell. Surprisingly, OO does not have a good way to enter the current date and time into a cell!
It has a functions that give the current date and time, and you can put those into the cell. That cell will then update to show the current date and time every time you open the spreadsheet or recalculate.
You can have a cell with those, and copy the values and paste the values, not the formula, but that is clumsy and awkward.
The best solution I've seen is to use a formula (such as =NOW()) in the cell, and then turn off AutoCalculate for that cell. That will freeze it unless you explicitly tell it to update. BTW, the manual claims that AutoCalculate does not apply to formulas involving NOW(), but what they mean I think is that the formula does not automatically update every second and trigger an updated of the whole sheet.
In Excel there are commands to insert the date and time in a cell, and they have keyboard shortcuts by default.
This might not seem like a big deal, but it means the OO is frustrating for my simple task of recording my auctions, and Excel would not be. When a program can in theory meet all your needs, but it keeps hitting you with these little annoyances, they add up.
Joel Spolsky wrote a great article about Excel and its competition from when he was on the Excel team. They and the major competitor were racing to get their next versions out. They had both concentrated on adding advanced functions--the kind of things that you'd use if you were a finance guy at a major corporation working on a complicated merger or an IPO or things like that. Things no normal person does.
Before the release, Microsoft did some serious user testing to find out what people ACTUALLY used Excel for. They found that one of the biggest uses was as a simple database for keeping lists of things, and doing simply calculations on those things.
They changed direction for the release. The fancy advanced functions were put on hold, and they concentrated on adding things to make Excel good at handling lists and doing the kind of calculations people actually wanted.
When that version of Excel came out, and the competitor came out with its "hey, you can do your merger or IPO on this!" set of features, Excel took over the market.
The OO people need to do what the Excel people did.
LaTeX doesn't do anything to help me figure out what to say.
For word processing, OpenOffice is pretty good. It's biggest failing compared to Word is a lack of a good organizational tool. It has some kind of "navigator" mode that has occasionally been offered as the answer for people who miss Word's outline view, but it doesn't compare. A few years ago, there was a post on the OO developer forums where a major OO developer acknowledged that this was a serious lack, and said it was on the roadmap. However, it would require a lot of chances so we were not to expect it soon. When that gets in, OO will be a lot more useful.
For spreadsheets, the gap is larger, and OO is behind not only at the high end (which is arguably not too critical--most people aren't using anywhere near the full power of Excel) but also has too many annoyances for casual use.
For example, on my gaming PC I wanted to use a spreadsheet to keep track of data on my sales from the auction house in Warhammer Online. When adding the data for a new auction, I needed to enter the date and time into a cell. Surprisingly, OO does not have a good way to enter the current date and time into a cell!
It has a functions that give the current date and time, and you can put those into the cell. That cell will then update to show the current date and time every time you open the spreadsheet or recalculate.
You can have a cell with those, and copy the values and paste the values, not the formula, but that is clumsy and awkward.
The best solution I've seen is to use a formula (such as =NOW()) in the cell, and then turn off AutoCalculate for that cell. That will freeze it unless you explicitly tell it to update. BTW, the manual claims that AutoCalculate does not apply to formulas involving NOW(), but what they mean I think is that the formula does not automatically update every second and trigger an updated of the whole sheet.
In Excel there are commands to insert the date and time in a cell, and they have keyboard shortcuts by default.
This might not seem like a big deal, but it means the OO is frustrating for my simple task of recording my auctions, and Excel would not be. When a program can in theory meet all your needs, but it keeps hitting you with these little annoyances, they add up.
Joel Spolsky wrote a great article about Excel and its competition from when he was on the Excel team. They and the major competitor were racing to get their next versions out. They had both concentrated on adding advanced functions--the kind of things that you'd use if you were a finance guy at a major corporation working on a complicated merger or an IPO or things like that. Things no normal person does.
Before the release, Microsoft did some serious user testing to find out what people ACTUALLY used Excel for. They found that one of the biggest uses was as a simple database for keeping lists of things, and doing simply calculations on those things.
They changed direction for the release. The fancy advanced functions were put on hold, and they concentrated on adding things to make Excel good at handling lists and doing the kind of calculations people actually wanted.
When that version of Excel came out, and the competitor came out with its "hey, you can do your merger or IPO on this!" set of features, Excel took over the market.
The OO people need to do what the Excel people did.
- I just can't tear myself away from Windows as my primary system until Wine becomes less of a pain to use. While Linux has alternatives for most of the software I use, the 10% it doesn't keeps me rooted to keeping Windows on my primary partition.
-With VMWare performance getting better and better with SSDs and multicore processors, I hardly notice a delay when I'm developing in a virtual machine.
-I hate dual-booting just so I can spend 10 minutes playing Angry Birds on my break. So I just stay in Windows.
-With VMWare performance getting better and better with SSDs and multicore processors, I hardly notice a delay when I'm developing in a virtual machine.
-I hate dual-booting just so I can spend 10 minutes playing Angry Birds on my break. So I just stay in Windows.
So the opposite is not true? There isn't anything that Linux offers you that Windows does not? Are you a coder? Try installing Node.js under cygwin. Good luck. Same for most linux-oriented programming environments. Windows works fine for the more mature languages (PHP, Ruby, Python, Java) which have direct ports and in many cases a compiler for the CLR.
You already use VMs, why not just open up a VM when you want to play angry birds?
After years of being away from Linux, I decided to give it another go with the latest Kubuntu a few days ago.
After a painless install I ended up being at the computer all day and up until 2am, obsessively tweaking and trying new stuff. I can't believe how much I miss it.
Btw, I was into redhat (circa 5.2) and Slackware, reconfiguring and recompiling the kernel over and over. Making the OS wicked-fast. The experience is even better now. Awesome!
After a painless install I ended up being at the computer all day and up until 2am, obsessively tweaking and trying new stuff. I can't believe how much I miss it.
Btw, I was into redhat (circa 5.2) and Slackware, reconfiguring and recompiling the kernel over and over. Making the OS wicked-fast. The experience is even better now. Awesome!
I feel ya on the experience, I ran Slackware for years and years (Dropline Gnome!) and around Ubuntu 5.x or so I was introduced to it and have been on it since. I had a short stint on Gentoo... glad those days are over
Heh. Gentoo required too much hackery and configuring for my tastes.
Redhat and fedora were always my faves. Love the rpm packaging system. But it seems Ubuntu and it's ilk are the most "user friendly".
Great write up btw Josh!
Redhat and fedora were always my faves. Love the rpm packaging system. But it seems Ubuntu and it's ilk are the most "user friendly".
Great write up btw Josh!
> So I downloaded some source and can't figure out how to install it
I don't think he's being fair here. Go to the website for a software package that has a version that runs under Linux. You want to install it. What does the website tell you?
Chances are, it says, "Download this tarball ...". Failing that, it generally gives you a list of command-line stuff to type. A big chunk of these are available via the standard GUI under Ubuntu. Why don't the websites mention this? I have no idea.
As a semi-recent (4 years ago) returnee to Linux, it took me some time to learn this: that, when installing software, I almost certainly want to ignore what the package website tells me and just use the Ubuntu GUI.
I can't imagine why anyone expects new Linux users to understand that.
I don't think he's being fair here. Go to the website for a software package that has a version that runs under Linux. You want to install it. What does the website tell you?
Chances are, it says, "Download this tarball ...". Failing that, it generally gives you a list of command-line stuff to type. A big chunk of these are available via the standard GUI under Ubuntu. Why don't the websites mention this? I have no idea.
As a semi-recent (4 years ago) returnee to Linux, it took me some time to learn this: that, when installing software, I almost certainly want to ignore what the package website tells me and just use the Ubuntu GUI.
I can't imagine why anyone expects new Linux users to understand that.
Yep, good point. I think it's a consumer expectation problem. We are used to installing desktop software by first downloading a package from the author's website. Linux distros break this expectation.
In mobile we have the opposite expectation. We expect to go to the platform's store and get the application.
Perhaps the introduction of the Mac App Store, Chrome Web Store, and (soon) Windows store will change the expectation a bit, and the Ubuntu way (which has existed as long as it has) won't seem foreign to people.
In mobile we have the opposite expectation. We expect to go to the platform's store and get the application.
Perhaps the introduction of the Mac App Store, Chrome Web Store, and (soon) Windows store will change the expectation a bit, and the Ubuntu way (which has existed as long as it has) won't seem foreign to people.
Good point about mobile! The expectation will surely change in the coming years because of the desktop software app stores. Linux, always ahead of the curve ;)
I can agree, I'm rarely fair ;) You nailed it about the Ubuntu GUI, I don't really expect newbies to know that though, that's why I wrote the post.
So do sound and wifi work out of the box yet? I come back every couple of years with that in mind and it's always been problematic.
Device driver issues are really the only reason I haven't become a convert.
Device driver issues are really the only reason I haven't become a convert.
Depends on what you mean by "out of the box". If you buy a Ubuntu computer (from, say, System76) then yes, it works out of the box (in the literal sense) as that is their business.
No device drivers just magically work. Someone has to test and ensure that the work; when you buy a computer they do that for you. When you install an operating system on a pre-owned computer your chances get smaller. Most manufacturers upgrade their drivers to ensure they work with the latest version of Windows (and Apple does the same for its computers).
No OS has complete hardware compatibility "out of the box". That's an insane request, of course. So if you want to compare apples to Apple, you have to compare a preinstalled linux box, not some computer you pulled out of your base with 2 inches of dust on top.
No device drivers just magically work. Someone has to test and ensure that the work; when you buy a computer they do that for you. When you install an operating system on a pre-owned computer your chances get smaller. Most manufacturers upgrade their drivers to ensure they work with the latest version of Windows (and Apple does the same for its computers).
No OS has complete hardware compatibility "out of the box". That's an insane request, of course. So if you want to compare apples to Apple, you have to compare a preinstalled linux box, not some computer you pulled out of your base with 2 inches of dust on top.
Look I get the technical reasons why, but as a computer user I don't care. I want someone else to have already done that work for me. Why would I make such an insane request?
Because there are other solutions available where that laziness is allowed.
Because there are other solutions available where that laziness is allowed.
I used to agree with you, but it's just not that simple. If I compare the amount of time I have spent trying to get some piece of hardware that should "just work" in Windows, to the amount of time I have spent trying to get some open source driver working with a similar piece of hardware on Linux, they are really not all that different.
When Windows 7 x64 came out, the Windows hardware advantage pretty much went away. You may be lucky enough to have your old peripherals just work, but chances are good that something will break.
So no matter what OS you choose, you need to do research, buy the appropriate hardware, etc.
Now, that said, I can almost guarantee that that old scanner in the bottom of the closet which stopped working with Windows 2000, will absolutely work just fine with the most current Linux kernel.
When Windows 7 x64 came out, the Windows hardware advantage pretty much went away. You may be lucky enough to have your old peripherals just work, but chances are good that something will break.
So no matter what OS you choose, you need to do research, buy the appropriate hardware, etc.
Now, that said, I can almost guarantee that that old scanner in the bottom of the closet which stopped working with Windows 2000, will absolutely work just fine with the most current Linux kernel.
Such as?
All major wifi chips now have open source drivers, so wifi will work out of the box for everybody as of 2.6.39: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-comment-Perseve...
Current versions of Linux (Ubuntu 11.04 etc) use 2.6.37, though.
All integrated sound solutions have open source drivers.
The only problem spot is graphics drivers.
You're more likely to run into device driver problems upgrading to Vista/7 than you are upgrading to Linux. (although there the problems are older printers and other peripherals that significantly predate Vista).
Current versions of Linux (Ubuntu 11.04 etc) use 2.6.37, though.
All integrated sound solutions have open source drivers.
The only problem spot is graphics drivers.
You're more likely to run into device driver problems upgrading to Vista/7 than you are upgrading to Linux. (although there the problems are older printers and other peripherals that significantly predate Vista).
ok good to know. I'll give it another shot then sometime soon.
For the most part, my most recent Dell laptop (Purchased 11/2010) wifi and sound worked great out of the box... actually my last 3 computers that's worked fine (speaking in the realm of Ubuntu)
Suspend / Hibernate still pretty flakey IMO :(
Suspend / Hibernate still pretty flakey IMO :(
I used to do the same thing. I was always disappointed. And then I got mad because I just wasted several hours of my life.