

Switching to Linux, you're doing it wrong - joshtronic
http://joshtronic.com/2011/04/switching-to-linux-youre-doing-it-wrong

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koeselitz
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.

~~~
joshtronic
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 ;)

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tzs

       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*)
    

The primary examples of "shitty Adobe or Microsoft application"s that keep
people from Linux are Photoshop and Office, respectively, both of which are
far superior to the closest Linux equivalents.

~~~
mnnttl
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.

~~~
jdludlow
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.

~~~
tzs
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.

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aashworth
\- 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.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
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.

------
bobbyfive
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!

~~~
joshtronic
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

~~~
bobbyfive
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!

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ggchappell
> 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.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
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.

~~~
joshtronic
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 ;)

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darkxanthos
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.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
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.

~~~
darkxanthos
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.

~~~
teilo
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.

