Wrapping up the Linux experiment

[johnridley]

This has been the most successful "Linux on the desktop" try yet for me. I really could continue to use it as is. However, the stack of little annoyances finally built up to where they're just not worth putting up with. I have workarounds for everything, but some of those involve booting a virtual XP box anyway. Mainly it's hardware compatibility (though I must say, in that respect great advances have been made), but the one that finally pushed me over the edge is a software issue that's apparently been around for years, but since it's not bothering any of the developers who know how to deal with the problem, it's not fixed.

Anyway, I remain impressed, and I may well recommend Linux in a few more places than I would have a month ago.

Comments

[sraun]

If I may be so nosy, what was the one software issue?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Non-trivial PDFs won't print. I got it down to a single page PDF, with a fair amount of formatting and 4 images. It goes to the print queue, and just sits there saying "processing". The printer gets hit immediately, locking it out for all other computers and users until this job finishes. I left one go for 8 hours, it never moved.

All these PDFs display just fine, they just won't print.

I can print simple PDFs - the problem seems to be mainly with multiple photos on the page. I find many instances of this problem, going back at least several years, and never any resolution except one guy was able to avoid it by using a PCL print driver instead of a postscript one.

I tried installing Adobe Reader and printing from that instead of from the default document reader, same deal.

I started up Windows XP in a VirtualBox session, loaded print drivers and Adobe Reader, and the documents printed in a few seconds.

When it gets to the point where at least one thing that I do every day requires me to start the Windows box, and there's no compelling reason to stay with Linux (when I'm running Windows, I never have to start a Linux box to do something) I may as well go run Windows.

I'm still undecided whether I'll run XP or 7. Probably 7, it's already installed, and my machine is right at the edge of what XP is able to handle (4 cores, 4GB RAM).

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

That whole 'needing a virtual xp' box struck me as the killer when you started this attempt. If you need windows anyway, you might as well stay with it. Juggling multiple OSes on one machine just strikes me as too annoying.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Well, even when I'm running Windows, I still need a virtual XP box. The VPN at work has the policy set where everything but local IPs get forced through the VPN. This means any outside connection goes through work's filtering, which means no BitTorrent, very restricted web browsing, and no expectation of privacy.

Even needing windows to get things done under Linux wouldn't necessarily be a killer, if there were enough things that were not possible under Windows, or were at least much easier under Linux. There just aren't. It's not an absolute killer, if I had strong feelings about it or there were an issue like Windows cost $1000 or something, I could live with Linux just fine, it's been really a fairly pleasant experience overall.

In prior attempts I've spend hours and sometimes days trying to get trivial stuff working, like just being able to print at all. That's really not a problem anymore, but there are still enough irritations to make it not worth it.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Here are the other issues I remember:

• Epson scanner - no support
  
• Cheap webcam - no support
  
• Photoshop CS4 - WINE apparently used to be able to run it, but they broke something that keeps the installer from working anymore, and they haven't fixed it yet.
  
• Automount occasionally just stops working for no readily apparent reason, and I have to either reboot or start going to the terminal and typing "sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdi1 /mnt/misc/" a lot.
  

and also...

• Gallery Remote simply doesn't work for me even though it's in Java and supposedly is cross platform. F-Spot has gallery uploading capability which is OK except to use it you have to import the photos into F-Spot's gallery. I don't really want to do that. All the software I found for photos wanted to "manage" all my photos, sorting them into albums, etc. I don't want it to touch my stuff, I just want it to perform basic operations on files.
  

[bwittig.livejournal.com]

I got M a bare bones netbook for Christmas and I spent some time sneaking around and configuring it.

I was pleasantly surprised that Ubuntu recognized the built-in WIFI and the built in webcam. I spent more time identifying the files needed to synchronize Thunderbird than I did installing the OS.

So, it should happily do email, web browsing and open office documents as needed. And I was able to find a background image switcher and something to put the calendar on the background just like the desktop M usually uses. Not exactly sophisticated requirements, BUT, I did not have to shell out an additional $50-90 for windows.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I'd have absolutely no trouble using Ubuntu as a portable machine. It works well. The stuff I have trouble with is all stuff I'd only do at home; printing certain file types, running the scanner, etc.

Back before Windows 7, I found Ubuntu did an awesome job finding hardware and "just work"ing. These days Win 7 did just as well, at least with my new machine (with all new stuff, so perhaps not a fair test of compatibility with odd stuff).