eastowners

Two months in, the great experiment where I replaced my primary computing platform with Ubuntu is going somewhat well, with very blatant missing items.  Most basic things have been replaced and I must admit that I prefer Gnome, as I have it set up, to Windows.  What I don’t like is the mish-mash of what feel like half-finished applications that are used to get it all going.

First, the list of definitely missing items.  Most of these are specific pieces of software that I have not found a direct replacement for.  Some things  are purely bitching, and some are what might be considered a real beef.

1. Digsby is not available for Linux yet.  This is a new, but super cool social-networking app.  Without it, I’ve lost track of Facebook, MySpace, and for the most part IM because I keep forgetting to start Pidgin, which I don’t want to auto-start because I’m not always on the internet.
2. Applications not in the repo are still too difficult to install.  Try installing Flock on Ubuntu for an example. There’s no standard method, and therefor, getting software that doesn’t make the repo is tough.  Managing third party repos is possible, but requires technical know-how and not all apps are in ubuntu-compatible form in repos.
3. No Photoshop.  Gimp is close, but it’s not a replacement.  No other app I’ve found even comes close.  I have to keep a Windows VM on my laptop just for Photoshop and Digsby, but it is a pain to start.
4. Adobe Air is still not updated to 1.1.  A lot of cool multi-platform Twitter apps are built on Air. The older version leaves certain features, like saving passwords, not possible.  This simply illustrates the fact that software vendors just don’t see a free desktop as viable.
5. Audio is, for all purposes, broken in it’s default config.  I had to follow a bunch of online instructions to get flash and thick apps to share the audio without making me restart Firefox in order to play music in an app after being on something like YouTube.  This is simply unacceptable.  Something as basic to modern computing as audio should be seamless.  On my desktop, it took some time and effort to get the spdif turned on.  However, I will say that it works better than the Windows drivers on the same box.
6. Suspend doesn’t work.  Why offer a feature if it doesn’t work?  The wlan card never comes back… basically making suspending the laptop worthless.
7. No free office package is as good MS Office 2007.  Say what you will about Microsoft, but they’ve been at it longer.  Their apps are good, solid, and feature-packed.  For basic word processing and spreadsheeting, the free alternatives work fine, but I don’t think I’d recommend them for business power users.  There’s a difference between “usable” and “mostly satisfying”.  IMHO Microsoft doesn’t have much to worry about yet.
8. An update killed X. Imagine my horror when X would not start after updating.  I was away from home when it happened without access to the internet (yes… I didn’t reboot before I left home), so troubleshooting the rather cryptic error presented by the gui was impossible.  When I got home, I found that apparently the permissions on one particular directory got messed up. Easily fixed, but not something I’d put on someone not technically inclined.  An update should never do that.

Second, a list of things I really like regarding the entire free-software-o-sphere.

1. Basket Note Pads.  Holy crap is this a good app.  The only thing is needs is online sync and I think it could take over the world.  I’m a avid user of OneNote and I really really like Basket a lot.  I’ll probably keep a Linux machine around just for Basket.
2. Music players.  There are numerous great music players that support all sort of social media.  It seems most every media application supports last.fm, audioscrobbler, and most have good plugin support that allows for all sorts of cool things.  I’ve been using Amarok and Banshee to test things.
3. Virtual Desktops. I really really like virtual desktops.  Linux in general (Gnome and KDE) both offer the best management and switching capabilities.  Virtual desktops on Windows pretty much suck.
4. Mimic some of MacOS X’s better features.  The expose clone works wonderfully.  Avant Window Manager is relatively stable (as long as you set up their repo and use the new versions).  The pure selection in window management tools is something to behold.  Most of this stuff is part of Compiz, which I consider essential.
5. Gnome location management. this is cool.  Used it when we went to CO for 12 days.  Just a couple of clicks to change your location.  Time changes to match and weather is updated from your current location. Nice for people who travel timezones.
6. Out of the box system monitoring tools.  both desktop managers have their own tools for out of the box system monitoring that are better than the windows tools.

So far, there have been some items that impressed me and others that still need a lot of work.  Most of the problems and issues with Linux on the desktop arise out of the lack of commercial support for time-tested applications as well as new exciting commercial applications.  The other overall theme is the lack of a cohesive vision in creating the desktop environment itself.   Ubuntu tries to help that by bundling things that are known to be pretty stable with each other, but it would be more ideal if there weren’t so many competing ideas of how it should be done all being implemented at once.

So far, if I had to rate my experience on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d rate it about a 6.  Windows XP comes in at around 8, Mac OSX comes in at a solid 9, and Windows Vista is a solid 5.  1 is completely unusable and 10 meets all my needs and then some.