Moving to Linux
Recently I switched from OS X to Ubuntu Linux as my main OS; I wanted to share some tips for anyone else making the switch on what apps I am using.
I'm using Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04, using Gnome (+ Compiz) as my display manager.
Applications
When picking applications to use, I generally tried to use the app that came with the OS (if any), and then if I had problems with it, looked for something else.
For web browsing, I use the dev channel of Google Chrome (and fall back to Firefox for a couple of extensions Rest Client and S3Fox); for e-mail, I've tried Evolution, the default client, but it doesn't work terribly well, so I just use GMail (if I want local access I'll probably switch to Thunderbird 3, which is a first-class app in Lucid Lynx).
For the terminal I use xfce4-terminal, because it's almost identical to gnome-terminal except that you can use Ctrl+C for terminating the current command as well as copying selected text; you can't do that with recent versions of gnome-terminal (all aboard the failtrain).
For my text editor (cf. TextMate), I'm using Geany, compiled off of svn and with all shipped plugins compiled; this adds the Tree Browser plugin, which is the closest thing to TextMate's project drawer (and which you don't get if you just download Geany off their site / install it with apt-get).
I'd like to point out how hard it was to find a GTK text editor with what I consider to be the most important parts of TextMate, the project drawer, and global autocomplete.
The GTK part is important, because I want a text editor that feels like all my other applications (I.e. Ctrl+C for copy and Ctrl+V for paste etc.) and I don't believe that any of the GUI vim/emacs packages really behave like proper GUI applications. I will try them out at some point though, so we'll see what happens then.
I tried Bluefish and jEdit, but they both had issues; from memory, I don't think Bluefish had autocomplete, and jEdit's text rendering was ugly, even with all the antialiasing etc. turned on.
I was astounded by the lack of linux text editors comparable to TextMate; I expected them to be a dime-a-dozen, but it seems the FOSS text editors need a bit of work before they will compare.
For music playing I use Rhythmbox, but with the Crossfading plugin activated; without this playback randomly fails. For video playing I use Gnome MPlayer; and sometimes the command-line mplayer application. I tried using the standard Totem player, but AFAIK it renders using XV, which my video card doesn't do very well at all (more on this in a future post).
I'm using wallpapoz to automatically change my desktop background once a minute; it works fairly well but it's a little tricky to use so here's how:
- Right click on Default and click Add Wallpapers (Directory), then select your wallpapers directory; make sure you tick recursive.
- Then once it's finished adding the wallpapers, click Preferences and tick "Pick wallpaper in random order", and choose the "Zoom" style; this will ensure wallpapers fill the full screen area (scaling) with out stretching them.
- Then click "Save" in the main window, then "Restart" for the changes to take effect.
For reading manga I used to use Xee on the Mac (an excellent free application). On linux, I tried these apps:
All of them had issues of one sort or another which made me keep looking; finally I found what I wanted with Comix. I've patched it to do side-scrolling which works great with two-finger horizontal scrolling on my touchpad.
Using Acer Hardware
Those are the main application switches I've needed to make; I'll post some more information on my move soon, including hardware-specific information on using linux with an Acer Aspire 5470G.
12:00 AM on Wednesday, 02/06/2010
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