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

[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.