I’ve been using Linux on servers for years, since before I started learning to code. Finally, after something like 7/8 years I am almost fully confident in severing the ties to my highly underused Windows installation on my personal laptop, but there are still a couple of exceptions. With the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, I’ve finally settled down using day-to-day tools that are equivalent to their Windows counterparts. Much of the software I use already have Linux compatible versions such as Eclipse, Google Chrome, FileZilla, Skype etc., however not all software does. Some I am happy to use (and work quite well!) in Wine (Spotify, Adobe Photoshop). Here’s what I’ve had to switch though:
- Windows Live Messenger > Pidgin or Empathy
- Microsoft Office > Google Docs
- Pinnacle Studio > OpenShot (although I am testing other packages still)
- Microsoft Money > Same, but in Virtualbox
- Winamp > Rhythmbox
Annoyingly Microsoft Money didn’t work in Wine, so I’m having to use a Virtualbox of XP for that. However, I’m looking at alternative solutions as personal accounting is important to me to keep on top of my finances.
Strictly speaking I don’t have a real alternative to Windows Live Messenger and Microsoft Money yet – Pidgin and Empathy don’t support webcam very well, and Microsoft Money is an ageing discontinued product anyway. Skype supports webcam just great, but I have privacy issues with Skype so I wouldn’t recommend my family using it*. I really need webcam to work perfectly as it does under Windows so my family can see my daughter growing up.
Getting the right video editing package is also difficult – I need one that takes advantage of my hardware. The KDE video editor Kdenlive crashed when I tried to drag an AVCHD file into the timeline, which wasn’t a good start. I have had a quick play around with OpenShot which seemed fairly smooth until two videos were playing at once, so I’m not sure whether that will be suitable in the end. Other software I’m going to look at are Cinelerra and PiTiVi, but so far I have not found a good enough equivalent to Pinnacle, so unfortunately I may still be tied to Windows for video editing. If anyone has any recommendations I’d love to hear them! Although I have heard that Linux may not have the licensing to use the AVCHD hardware decoder, which may be why I can’t get anything to work that well?
As for Winamp to Rhythmbox, truth be told I hardly use either these days. I mostly play music through my X-Box 360 which suits me for 99% of purposes.
There is a particular site called osalt.com which allows you to find a Windows package and find an alternative Windows or Linux similar application which can be quite handy for switching to Linux. The one thing that will plague Linux until it can get it’s act together is that there are no true alternatives to the popular packages (although some would argue otherwise), such as Photoshop. GIMP is nice, but I am too used to Photoshop and try as I might, I can’t get on with GIMP. The video acceleration (although supported by ATI) doesn’t seem too good for AVCHD editing, and that puts a spoke in my wheel too. Lack of a decent Windows Live Messenger has been a drawback for a long time. OpenOffice 3.2 still hasn’t made it into the Ubuntu repositories, which means my desktop office package is slow, so I use Google Docs instead.
As you might have guessed, I could go on for a while. This might all sound very negative, but there is many positives to Linux too. Community support can be excellent – so much better than calling a “tech support” centre in India to be told to restart my computer… More often than not I find community support is actually much better than paid support. Ubuntu is free, as is all of the software I use on it (apart from a few obvious exceptions mentioned above, but they are Windows software running in Ubuntu). I find the user interface much nicer. It’s faster than Windows on my laptop. The list could go on for a while.
I sometimes sit and think of reasons why I shouldn’t just go back to Windows, but I can never get out of my head the thought that – well Linux works just fine, why go through the transition back to Windows?
* The privacy issue I have, if you’re interested, is that when you open a new Skype account, by default anyone from anywhere can message/call you. Why you would want a random stranger contacting you by default is beyond me… It’s simple enough to turn it off, but I really think this option should be disabled by default.
