one monkey typing

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.

I ran through a couple of tutorials on KDEnlive - a video editing suite - and it seems at least as powerful as the Pinnacle suite that I paid $130 for last year for Windows. It looks very similar (of course, most non-linear editors have a similar feel).

Over the weekend I loaded up MuseScore and transcribed a piece of music for J that was such a horrendous copy that it was almost unreadable even in good light and squinting at it - certainly not usable in performance. MuseScore is quite powerful, though a bit unstable (for all platforms) - just hitting ctrl-S every minute or so is advisable.

Anyway, very nice software, and it's nice to be on a platform I actually like.

Last time I tried Linux on the desktop for real was probably 3 or 4 years ago. When I installed it back then, I didn't like it, but figured I'd stick with it for as long as possible and see if I grew to like it. I didn't.

Since then I've maintained that while it may work for a lot of people, it didn't work for me.

However, this latest attempt looks like it may very well stick permanently. Everything has been quite easy to get going. I've found Linux native equivalents for nearly everything I do. The only hard exception is that my Epson scanner simply is not, and never will be, supported; Epson just isn't interested in even releasing specs. So for that reason I have a virtualbox install of XP with just those drivers and Photoshop (I think I will actually try using GIMP instead, to see if I can get used to that).

There are still a few programs for which I can't find equivalents, mainly astronomy software. For those, I'm using Windows programs, but WINE (the system that allows running Windows software under Linux) is apparently pretty mature and these programs seem to be running just fine under Linux.

I've been moving all my hard drive data over to ext4 volumes; I've never liked NTFS anyway, and I trust an OS running its native filesystem better. Also ext4 seems blazing fast compared to NTFS. But moving a number of terabytes over to a temp space, reformatting the drive, then moving it back takes a lot of time, especially since mostly I'm moving the data over USB. Start a copy, go to work. Start another copy, go to sleep. etc.

I continued to get my home Linux set up last night.

One thing that's been surprising me is that for the couple of things that I am running Windows software for (Grabit and Picture Information Extractor (PIE)), the software runs faster and better(*) under WINE/Linux than it does on Windows 7. I mean, significantly faster in one case.

It took me a couple of tries to get the non-free version of VirtualBox installed correctly; I need the non-free one because that's the one with the USB filtering support. With that in place, I'm able to run my Epson scanner and Photoshop totally smoothly under a guest copy of XP. The scanner and the cheap webcam that also didn't have any Windows 7 drivers so far are the only real snags. For the scanner, the forums all say "no driver, and there probably never will be, because Epson refuses to release either specs or drivers."

(*)GrabIt has a couple of owner-draw (custom appearance) controls, and they don't always render correctly under Windows 7. I haven't noticed any problems at all under WINE running under Linux.