I use GNOME desktop so, most of your apps aren’t in my list. I use Linux mainly for work stuff: svn, ruby, lighttpd, liferea reader, gaim, firefox, google maps, and xmms. Evolution for e-mail, because i’m not a freak of e-mail (check twice a day). Oh, MPlayer Movie Player for movies every day, sweet.
— mini-d 
Hi,
just wondering why you use GNOME, when half of your applications are KDE anyway and some of those missing are in KDE already (IIRC, Quicksilver = Katapult in KDE). And sorry, KMail is way more powerful than Thunderbird — I tried it just week ago and I am glad to be back in KMail.
Best,
Matej
I like Nautilus better than Konqueror, GNOME Terminal better then KTerm (edit: oops, it’s called Konsole), and GNOME Deskbar better than Katapult. But yeah, I end up with KDE libs loaded most of the time. :)
— Mark
Pan-OS: Firefox (default browser outside of OS X).
Windows: Paint Shop Pro, Trillian, ActivePerl, PuTTY, FlashFXP, EditPad Pro.
Mac OS X: Apple Mail, iPhoto, iTunes (all three of them by active choice and not just settling for what ships), Flip4Mac (WMV QuickTime codec), VLC (because its Mac GUI sucks less than mplayer and appears to be actively developed), SubEthaEdit, NetNewsWire, Acquisition (made by Dave Watanabe, the Soup Nazi of independent Mac application developers), Inquisitor (ditto), Adium, Growl, Synergy (for showing iTunes bezels), Camino, OmniWeb (default browser), Safari, Opera (why yes, I am a web developer).
Linux (and the command line parts of OS X): I look forward to installing Ubuntu when my MacBook gets delivered. Until then, some outdated and meager notions: nano/pico (and emacs over vi on the account of being slightly less insane if I have to choose), curl over wget (but not by much), Galeon over Konqueror (built-in vertical tabs; I prefer Firefox over Galeon), GIMP over… wait, just say GIMP, GAIM, apt-get.
Many of those are proprietary applications. As a software developer, this bugs me more than I’d like to admit. As a user, old habits die hard, and by “old habits die hard” I really mean “not switching unless confronted with a better alternative or slightly worse but with available source” instead of “I’m a retarded bigot”.
— Jesper
Here some other programs you might be interrested in:
http://listengnome.free.fr/ - Listen which supports my iPod perfectly, has got a very nice gtk frontend. I even like it more then amarok since it fetches more lyrics, the wikipedia support looks a bit better. And I like it since GTK looks better than Qt.
I havn’t tried diva by now (http://www.diva-project.org/) but it tries to create an easy to use, scalable, open-source video editing software for the GNOME desktop.
Instead of Konversation I use X-Chat (http://xchat.org/) which just rocks :-) Check out tomboy. It’s a very cool way for managing notes on the desktop and don’t forget to install beagle since the deskbar supports it :-)
And finally — use gvim instead of emacs :D *scnr*
Regards,
Armin
SessionSaver is a “must install” Firefox extension.
— Sérgio Nunes
Oh yeah, I have Beagle too. It’s very pretty, but I haven’t used it “for real” yet. I never used Spotlight either, or Google Desktop Search, or Copernicus, or whatnot. Don’t really know why; I guess they just don’t match up with how I want to find stuff. I’m not sure how I find stuff. They also tend to uncover a lot of stuff that I would prefer to keep buried. I don’t think it’s healthy to have your entire life’s work a constant distance away. This isn’t about excluding specific directories, I know Beagle can do that. It’s more about “show me all the email messages that contain these keywords, except the ones from Randi after 1999, Kim after 1998 or between 1989 and 1991, and the ones I sent to the info-mac moderators in 1993.” Is there a desktop search engine that helps you lose things? That would be very useful. Really.
— Mark
Tab Mix Plus has a SessionSaver feature, and Firefox 2 will have one built-in.
— Mark
Well, I’m still on a Mac. But this is pretty strong stuff.
I’d really miss OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner though.
Feel free to stop calling us “fanboys.”
GNOME Terminal a KTerm are bloatware. Any X Terminal Emulator that lets you change the background “picture” is bloatware - xterm is powerful, simple and chaperons 90% of communication with my computer.
GNOME looks nicer than KDE and is easier to use IMO but Ion3 is a graphical usable interface for people who value keyboard navigation and hate the mouse.
I have found amaroK to be slow and buggy - no GNU/Linux application has yet to handle my medium to large music collection with ease, though I like Rhythmbox the most.
At any one time it is guaranteed that I will be using xterm and Firefox and Gaim. Everything else is by the by.
— Noah Slater
I have a couple of Ubuntu installs with all manner of things crammed on them. I have a new one I’ve been using for 2-3 weeks, and it turns out this stuff is what I *really* need in addition to the stock install:
* GNU Emacs + my modes and such
* GAIM
* Firefox + Firebug
* Ethereal
* Chatzilla + XULRunner 1.8.0.4 tarball (no stability warnings yet)
* Erlang + yaws
* Thunderbird
* Lots of non-free codecs and such
* Netbeans 5.x for J2ME
* Wine for J2ME codegen scripts
* IDEA for other Java
* All the dev packages needed for building mozilla
Stuff I use that you don’t:
* WMI - (nee WMII) a window manager optimized for switching between windows. Nothing else comes close. It sucks for anything else, so ymmv.
* vim7 - I
ah well, comment eaten.
I prefer “Macolyte” or “the faithful” over mac fanboys.
> Lots of non-free codecs and such
Oh yes, I forgot the obligatory link to EasyUbuntu, an application designed to take all the pain out of violating patents, breaking laws, and compromising the very principles that led you to Linux in the first place, in exchange for being able to watch a recreation of the latest box office hit in 30 seconds with bunnies.
Yeah, I installed that too.
— Mark
EasyUbuntu is so last year! I found Automatix to be a big improvement.
I looked at Automatix (even installed it while testing off a Live CD while waiting an interminable length of time for Lenovo to ship me my computer) but ended up going with EasyUbuntu because I only need like 1/10th the stuff that EasyUbuntu does and 1/100% of what Automatix does. But either way, who could resist getting their software from a group that calls themselves the Penguin Liberation Front? Not to be confused with the Penguin Freedom Front, the Penguin Front of Liberation, or the Liberation Front of Penguins. Fucking Penguin Front of Liberation. What a bunch of wankers.
— Mark
I actually love Epiphany as my default web browser. It’s even got some extensions such as AdBlock, although it doesn’t support those that Firefox uses. Epiphany may look like a dumbed-down version of Firefox at first, but it’s well integrated into GNOME (which also means having a session manager built in as long as you don’t close it both manually AND cleanly (you have to either have GNOME quit it or be evil and kill it using a signal; I know that’s dumb, but it makes sense in a weird kind of way)) and a real pleasure to use. I especially like its highly usable tab-based interface and its search bookmarks.
It’s simple, it’s efficient and It Doesn’t Suck (or at least not as much as other browsers do ;)). I’d be even happier if it used the GNOME keyring in order to store web passwords. Oh well. Will have to wait for that feature, I guess.
i’ll second pretty much everything on that list. my additions:
* mutt + gnupg
* gkrellm2
* ion (the windowless window manager)
* screen
* xsane (for scanning drawings)
* gimp (for cleaning up the scans)
* bittorrent (just the plain vanilla commandline version straight from Bram)
* and i prefer rox as a file manager when i want to click around my files instead of opening an xterm
— Anders
Take a look at urxvt for terminal emulation. Faster with less CPU load than xterm (never mind the desktop-enabled emulators), even when using Xft+AA, and smaller memory footprint. Loads up instantly.
Another vote for mutt ( + fetchmail + procmail + esmtp), too. (Though it seems to be a Vim-er’s thing; being an Emacsian, you’re more likely to want Gnus.)
Thanks, Aristotle. urxvt looks nice. I think it might work.
Gnus is fabulous feature-wise, but it’s just so *slow*, especially accessing remote inboxes over imap. I tried really hard to use it instead of mutt for a few months since I have emacs open 24/7 anyway, but then one day I started up mutt by accident and was reminded how much faster it was and just couldn’t go back.
— Anders
With all due respect…
And call me a fanboy for all I care…
I use a Mac. I don’t like sentences with “It’s like…”. I like using the “…”
I don’t mind if the software is closed-source or propriety, my *data* isn’t.
— Musti
btw. What about a screeshot? ^^
Regards,
Armin
MPlayer (and MEncoder). Compiled from source, yo. It’s the only thing I’ve felt the need to recompile, or indeed compile in the first place.
Any particular reason you had to compile? Or just ‘cos it’s fun? :-)
— antrix
Mark,
I really respect and admire your decision to switch to linux. I have been using Linux full-time for about a year now havn’t looked back once. I absolutely love it.
From your post, I realized that Linux really needs something like quicksilver: something that will change the way they use their computer. “Openoffice.org does what Word does”, etc, IMO does not want to make people change their operating system. Stuff like amarok and Xgl/Compiz are getting there, but isn’t quite that “killer app” that you can barely live without once you’ve used it (much like quicksilver).
So here’s to GNOME3 and KDE4, hoping that they’ll innovate upon the modern desktop and truly change the way a person uses their computer.
— Evan
Dirvish is cool for keeping more than just the last backup in a space-efficient manner.
— Brent
I was trying to find out what “chingada madre” translates into English because a very close friend of mine says it all the time yet refuses to tell me what it means so I set out to find out on my own. I came across this site in my search and saw your comment about how you said you would love to learn how to say “I have the fire of the sun in my pants.” in Spanish. I don’t know if you’ve already found out the translation but it’s “Tengo el fuego del sol en mis pantalones”. Just thought I’d help you out. Nicole
— Anonymous
great list! ubuntu of course. i have been all over the place in a decade - windows, freebsd, linux, osx…ubuntu is the first distro that cured me of wanting to try other distros. maybe suse is better - i have no idea, until ubuntu disappoints me, i am sticking with it.
my firefox set up is almost identical. i rarely see ads at all. the filtering tools are amazingly effective.
emacs, natch.
for backups of data, i use DAVs connecting to my boutique email provider, fastmail.fm ($ but worth it), who provide IMAP, DAVs, file storage, etc etc. i can use mutt or thunderbird with it…with IMAP my client is a matter of daily whim.
i replaced open office with abiword and gnumeric, but honestly i very rarely use these.
i go between mocp and rhythmbox for music. mocp is nice, as mutt is to thunderbird, mocp is to graphical music players.
i also use elinks from time to time. its nice to know you can live in a console if you have to.
— grumpY!
I know it would be considered blasphey because it’s closed source, proprietary (costs very little money) AND java but over the years of looking for proper Quicken replacement that runs on Linux (short of running Quicken under VMware) I have yet to find one which is more useable than MoneyDance.
My first concern is QIF file import because this is what all the financial institutes provide to download but beyond that its interface seems the most understandable and “make sense”.
— Amos Shapira
Nice list of Ubuntu applications Mark! For blocking ads and micromanaging my HTTP stream like a swiss papercutter on benzedrine, I use Privoxy with FireFox. Yeah, it’s old but I’m used to tweaking it and it’s flexible enough to deal with new marketing insults.
Great list, and great suggestions in the comments. There’s not muhc left for me to add. But I would definitel add:
screen (like tabbed consoles without the [visual] tabs, and also keep on running in the background when detached/logged off)
irssi + Bitlbee (all IM protocols on irc on a console)
Alltray (which allows you to tray any application)
linux-phc (undervolt your Pentium M and enjoy cooler and fanless working)
truecrypt (kiler-feature: it’s cross-platform)
— Sencer
Errr… if somebody can recommend me a spell-checker…
— Sencer
Sencer, emacs has one built in - press `M-x ispell-buffer’.
From the console:
$ ispell filename.txt
— Noah Slater
Thumbs up for another linux user!
> Any particular reason you had to compile [mplayer/mencoder]?
Because a major new release came out about a week after Dapper shipped, and I wanted to try it. Also, I wanted support for more video codecs than the prebuilt binary included.
— Mark
So did you buy a new camera?
extra credit:
Have you tested it with your shiny new install?
I’m contemplating the setup of a Linux box. These lists of software options are incredibly helpful. Elsewhere, I’ve been reading of the benefits of the ZFS file system in OpenSolaris. For a rookie in the Linux realm, will the app’s listed here run on OpenSolaris and how does OpenSolaris compare or contrast with Ubuntu? Ultimately, it boils down to which of the OS’s allows a newbie to get up and running with minimal Tylenol consumption?
— Steve
> So did you buy a new camera? extra credit: Have you tested it with your shiny new install?
Yes, as I noted a few weeks ago, I bought the Canon PowerShot SD450. When I plugged the camera into my shiny new install, Ubuntu immediately recognized it and offered to import the photos, which I did, and it worked. I believe this is the work of libgphoto2, which is one of those amazing little libraries that does one incredibly useful thing incredibly well and just keeps getting better for free. Someone out there *really* cares about interfacing with digital cameras, in much the same way that I *really* care about parsing RSS and Atom feeds.
— Mark
I just wish my laptop’s network card would work with Ubuntu… I spent about 6 hours I didn’t have working on it the other day, to no avail. Grrrr… I love Ion, but I can’t be wired up all the time.
http://www.sebpayne.com/2006/06/27/one-thing-apple-did-right/ might help Mark! The Linux ‘version’ of the iLife suite but this may not suit you!
I’m considering making the jump - albeit with Linux on PowerPC laptop as I couldn’t afford a new laptop at the this point but I have plenty of spare desktop boxes! Would you recommend it? Is it worth it?
I’d give some thought to using something other than Gnome. I use the Ice Window Manager (IceWM) with nautilus turned off, (but available from the taskbar when I need a file/icon manager.) If you don’t mind hand-editing some configuration files, Idesk will manage your icons and do absolutely nothing else. It saves a lot of overhead.
— Troutwaxer
Mark, did you partition your disk /, /home, /usr, etc…? If so, can you point to a good recommendation for sizing? If not, why?
Thanks for sharing your insights into your recent switch. I’m running both Tiger and Ubuntu at home. I’m trying to spend more time on my Ubuntu box though. Some things just seem easier to do in Ubuntu than OS X.
Thanks.
— Yokimbo
(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0kB - 750GB
Disk label type: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32kB 107MB 107MB primary ext2
2 107MB 3323MB 3216MB primary linux-swap
3 3323MB 25GB 21GB primary ext3
4 25GB 750GB 725GB primary xfs
— Mark
Oops, that’s missing the mount points. 1 is /boot, 2 is swap, 3 is /, 4 is /home. I ln -s /tmp to /home/tmp since things like k9copy like to store DVD images in /tmp.
— Mark
@Steve: If you really want to play with an OpenSolaris-based distro, there’s Nexenta (gnusolaris.org), which attempts to bring an Ubuntu-ish GNOME desktop, Debian packages, and the GNU userland to OpenSolaris. It’s still a work in progress — they’ve got a little more than half of the Ubuntu packages in their repositories, but it’s not as polished or tightly integrated as more mature distributions. Probably not for most rookies, though.
If you want a distro that Just Works, the answer is at the top of this page: Ubuntu. (In my case, I use Kubuntu with a few GNOME apps like Gaim, though in the end, my list is similar to Mark’s.)
— Ian King
Thanks, Ian. With further digging, I see that OpenSolaris with ZFS might be the ticket for a web server, but for a newbie learning Linux, clearly Ubuntu is the better desktop choice. Mark’s discussion of his software decisions just paves the way for those of us who are clueless.
— Steve
I’m a long-time Debian desktop and server user and I recently installed Kubuntu on my main desktop, just to see what it was like. I have no problems installing Debian (because I’m used to it and I built all my machines so I don’t have any hardware compatibility issues) however I spent the rest of the day in shock as Kubuntu installed while I was making coffee, and just worked. Wow. I’d second the recommendation to try out KMail, it’s the only mail application that seems to handle my massive IMAP mailboxes properly, I use a Mac at home and Mail on OSX is intolerably slow.
— Rachel
I tried to make the switch to Linux with SuSE 8.0 a few years back, but it didn’t stick. I tried Ubuntu on a whim about a month ago and I love it. I’ve tried several distro’s live CD’s and I keep coming back to Ubuntu. I also have PCLinuxOS and opensuse installed. I’ll probably sh**can suse. Just too much bloat that I don’t need. About the only thing I miss from Windoze is xplorer², which rocks.
— buzz
What about the Airport card in my iBook G4? Is that fully supported?
— Autrelle
Regarding zfs, just wait a bit longer for it to be open sourced and ported to linux/ubuntu.
I imagine with Sun backing ubuntu on its server line you will see zfs on ubuntu before other linux distros. There was something on the net recently about open sourcing zfs so it is probably a done deal. Rock on!
— Daver
> What about the Airport card in my iBook G4? Is that fully supported?
No. I believe it just made it into the latest kernel last week. Better wait until the next release of your favorite distribution; recompiling your own kernel is a lousy introduction to Linux. I believe the next version of Ubuntu is due out in October.
— Mark
Mark: about your photo manager application, have you tried f-spot( http://f-spot.org/ )? Since i don’t have a camera i can’t really recommend it, but all people i know that use linux just rave about this application.
What i like about your list is the mix of applications from both Gnome & KDE. Most people, like myself, tend to use only applications avaiable to the Desktop Environment they use and somehow end in restricting themselves. You on the other hand went and picked the best of each one and seem to be doing ok :)
Btw, another mention for Tomboy. So simple, yet so amazing.
Nice list. Thanks. FWIW, I run OpenSuSE, and before that SuSE, as far back as 7.3, as essentially a desktop system / power user. Haven’t run Windows for other than games for something like three years. two years.
Additions:
- I like a mind mapping tool. Freemind is a good one.
- I also like having a very generic “stonepile” manager for collecting notes to self, and pieces of writing in progress (referring to the metaphor in Weinberg’s book on writing, subtitled “the Fieldstone Method.) A personal wiki workes nicely for that. I’m using MoinMoin at the moment.
- Don’t see OpenOffice. There’s some griping about it, here and there. Don’t get that. It works just fine for me.
- Firefox extensions: Bookmark Duplicate Detector, Dictionary search, Sage (vs. feeds other places), and StumbleUpon, for extra time wasting fun.
— Jim Bullock
Gaim encryption? Weak tea. It’s time to go _Off the Record_.
— Nuthatch
Ha! Thanks for the tips and the humor all wrapped up for me to discover & chortle my way thru.
I don’t get the whole Gnome/KDE divide, either. I use a mix as well; some programs are simply Better regardless of what desktop they’re based on, and if you’re running one, there’s no obstacle to running stuff based on the other, so wtf is the problem?
I had no clue gaim has plugins! And now finally I can get rid of those obnoxiously stupid WARN and BLOCK buttons that I’m forever accidentally hitting…
I need to learn more about Quicksilver and why it is that all macboys (ha) wax rhapsodic about it regardless of their relationship otherwise with mac…
Cheers,
Cindy
— cindy
Quite an extensive set of jibes and the software list ain’t bad neither. Would add… Application: qtparted. Firefox extension: FireFTP; Spellbound had become quite nice, so of course it’s broken again.
— jcwinnie
Mark,
I was astonished to see such an excellent list. Good choices! k3b should definately be in there ;)
Now.. I may have to start rediscovering software! :) Congradulations on remaining OS X free. Those Apple bastards…
RE: “Tengo el fuego del sol en mis pantalones”. Trousers are generally not as funny.
I think it is therefore “Tengo el fuego del sol en mis mutandes”
“GNU Emacs, for people who think that the main problem with XEmacs is that it’s too user friendly.”
Uh, I guess you are 4 years behind times, approximately. User friendliness of Emacs went par with 21.1 (at least if you are using X11). But catching up another 4 years is still nice to do, so take the emacs-snapshot-gtk package (it’s even in Ubuntu universe). While this is “unreleased developer software”, it works quite better than what other people call released.
The main problem with XEmacs nowadays probably is that it can’t deal well with utf-8.
— David Kastrup
Mark, if you like rsync for backups, you might love rsnapshot - give it a looksie. Uses rsync underneath, but adds a helping of brains on top.
> emacs-snapshot-gtk
Yeah, I already have that. HTML needs a sarcasm tag.
— Mark
I’ll just add that Ze Frank Rocks!!! But some people just don’t seem to get it. Muy Fabuloso!!!
— Eric
I used to be a XEmacs zealot, but a killer app came along and I learned to love emacs for its differences. The app is ‘nxml-mode’. I adore it to bits. Fractional bits, perhaps even.
— emacs vs. XEmacs
Is missing to the list, PlanetaMessenger.org, Universal Java messenger for win/Linux/Solaris/ …..
http://www.planetamessenger.org
Juan
— Juan
well, why not? everyone is listing their favs anyway…
can’t live without:
* vim
* bash
* grep
* elinks (to read html docs)
* gcc
* python
yea. i also have a few standalone command-line audio players for particular formats: timidity, nosefart, mikmod etc
why fancy costly GUIs? you should all learn to see beyond the Matrix illusion… :P
hey, nice “comment preview”… ;)
— namekuseijin
The XEmacs beta does support utf-8, as long as we’re comparing snapshots. The only XEmacs features that keep me from moving to Gnu Emacs (particularly Gnu Emacs CVS with Xft support) are buffer tabs and clickable line numbers in Python exception output.
— Daverz
I’ve been using Ubuntu for nearly two years now and these software lists appear stranger and stranger over time. Nowdays I’d have to stop and think about which program I was using for any particular task, or even look it up. Instead it’s just “whatever program runs when I open this file”. The lists are also strange because they’re nearly all programs that you can try out in the Applications->Add/Remove menu or via Synaptic. If you have too much time on your hands and a reasonable internet connection you can try every music player in the repository to see which one suits your personal tastes best, then remove the ones you don’t like just by selecting them from the menus. An actual comparative review of some category would be much more useful than a list of titles.
PS: If you’re switching and you want to help out, keep a journal of all the annoying/confusing things and bugs that you find and when you get a better feel for what you’re doing send the items off to those who can fix them for the next person.
— Michael
first: nice list.
however, it’s ‘konsole’ not ‘kterm’. or maybe that’s your problem: you’re running some mutant app called kterm instead of konsole? ;) oh, and if you want something truly neat and handy in the terminal world, check out yakuake:
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=yakuake&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
or just `apt-get install yakuake` in *buntu
start it from the Run Command dialog (session management will take care of starting it on subsequent log-ins) and when it’s up hit F12. ooooH! =)
— Aaron J. Seigo
*sigh* i guess it helps to paste the correct tab’s url, doesn’t it? yakuake is actually: http://yakuake.uv.ro/
— Aaron J. Seigo
The ChatZilla problem you were running into was nothing to do with data corruption. It was a firefox bug with timers and has been fixed.
— a ChatZilla developer
I see it mentioned elsewhere by others, but I’ll 2nd or 3rd Tomboy notes. On Windows I used a combo of MS OneNote and ActionOutline, but I find I get more done in less time with Tomboy. Bonus: It’s free (as in speech AND beer)!
— Jonathan
G’day from a developer of the GNOME Deskbar.
You say “Quicksilver, only without the plugins”. Well, the GNOME Deskbar does plugins, but it just doesn’t have that many of them… yet. And plugin management currently sucks (it’s copy this .py file that you downloaded from some random geezer’s website into this secret directory) - we’re working on it.
Since Santa has yet to give me a Mac, could you elaborate on what I’m missing out on with QS plugins (or just QS in general)?
P.S. +1 re Epiphany and Tomboy.
“I was trying to find out what “chingada madre” translates into English… and saw your comment about how you said you would love to learn how to say “I have the fire of the sun in my pants.”
The literal translation of “chingada madre” is “fucked and/or raped mother”. (not “fucked-up mother”) It’s a versatile exclamatory speech-act similar to “bloody hell”, “fucking hell”, “mother fucker!”,etc.
My renditions of “I have the fire…” vary according to the meaning I want to convey:”Siento en la entrepierna la energía de una potente bomba de hidrógeno”; “Tengo la verga achicharrada por la insolación que cogí en la playa”, “Me han dado por el culo con candela… solar”, “Quiero coger contigo.Mi aparato es un gigante rojo”.(as in stellar red giant)
“Ubuntu” is also Yoruba for Atis,(Annona squamosa-Sugar Apple) my favorite fruit.
— Rubem
> could you elaborate on what I’m missing out on with QS plugins (or just QS in general)?
Yeah, I’ll steal my old Powerbook back from my wife long enough to take some screenshots and write up some thoughts to go with them.
— Mark
Marc, welcome to a new world of fanboys: KDE vs. GNOME, Emacs vs. Vim, GUI vs. TUI and more, just name it and there’ll be a fanboy waiting :)
— Michele
Here’s another difference between the two fanboy worlds, and one that’s heartening to see: with the Free Software world, the developers of the apps you’re using for free head over to your blog and ask what they can do to improve things for you. :)
- C.
— Chris
Wow, after reading about all the time spent geeking out on workarounds, etc. I’m thinking I just want to get work done… not be constantly spending my time dealing with workarounds to make things work so I can get things to work to get work done… I’m sticking with my Mac and OS X. It simply gets my work done immediately… fast. Very fast. My computer is a money-making tool, not a hobby. The DRM is optional on Macs, BTW. Have fun tinkering. : /
— Revolution
You could try cinelarra it does a lot more than kino, though its not as easy as iMovie.
Instructions for ubuntu are here
http://www.kiberpipa.org/~gandalf/ubuntu/README
— Dan
Does anybody dual-boot OS-X and Ubuntu? For making presentations, I can’t live without easy cut-and-paste and resizing of PDFs. Nothing seems to do this as well as OS X.
— Marshall
…RE: “Tengo el fuego del sol en mis pantalones”. Trousers are generally not as funny.
I think it is therefore “Tengo el fuego del sol en mis mutandes”…
Either way, it’d be *los* pantalones/mutandes, not mis. You can’t use posessives with articles of clothing.
— abk
I’ll second the use if mplayer. I don’t see why you’d need iMovie though. I’m a huge mplayer fanboy.
My other issue is that OS X still doesn’t do a very good job running X applications. Emacs and xterm (which only uses about 1M of memory so is a fav of mine) just don’t work very well.
> Ubuntu, which is an ancient African word meaning “can’t install Debian”.
I know, I know, it’s supposed to be funny, but I can’t help but mentally translate “can’t install Debian” to “if you need it, you’re a frickin’ moron.”
So, um, yeah, not funny.
— regeya
Inkscape for vector graphics. (And of course, The GIMP, duh.) And Gwenview for quickly browsing image files.
PS: to replace iMovie you can try MainActor. It’s very similar to Adobe Premiere (and also costs money, a cool $200.) The demo is free, however.
You left out VLC the “it actually plays what you want to play” movie player.
Quanta Plus, the best *ml editor for any platform.
KFlickr for pushing those images from Digikam to the interwebs.
Cedega for playing the World of Warcraft.
— kebernet
Did you check out Strigi for search? It’s faster and lighter than beagle. The KDE3 GUI requires konqueror though. No GNOME GUI yet although that should be easy to program.
— Lais
For those who are looking to get a machine that, unfortunately, comes preinstalled with Windows yet you have no intention of running it, a fine resource for getting a refund of the “Microsoft Tax” is WindowsRefund.org
— bmouring
> Nigel
You can take a look at the Quicksilver screencasts here,
http://theappleblog.com/category/screencasts/
although I find it difficult to get a sense of what is going on in those screencasts. I think it’s one of those things you have to actually use to appreciate.
— anonymous
This list is proof that you are not an average computer user.
Most people don’t much care which OS they’re using as long as they can use the tools that they need to get their particular job done. As graphic designer, the limiting factor right now is the poor quality (or complete lack) of professional-quality apps. I mean, GIMP is great as a free application, but itsn’t even close to being a replacement for Photoshop.
I understand the concern with portability of data and open formats, but I can’t afford to cut off my nose to spite my face. At this point I feel that my data is portable enough (meaning that I can back it out to portable, open, formats as well now as I’ll likely be able to in the future) and I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there will be an ongoing premium expense for using the Mac. I’m ok with that — my time is more valuable.
By the way, I’m with Joe Clark: your use of the term mac-fanboy isn’t up to the quality of the rest of what you have to say.
— Tim Swan
I’ll add Samba, which is essential if there be Windows boxes in your local (or office) network. Takes much of the pain out of maintaining a Windows/Mac/*nix LAN. And apt-get — keeping your whole system up to date that easily is surely a part of that “usability” thing.
Funny thing is that Ubuntu’s installer for versions 4.10 through 5.10 was actually based on debian-installer, so maybe “can’t install Debian” doesn’t really apply.
— Ian King
> This list is proof that you are not an average computer user.
Never claimed I was.
> As graphic designer, the limiting factor right now is the poor quality (or complete lack) of professional-quality apps.
Agreed 100%. However, I am not a graphic designer.
> I mean, GIMP is great as a free application, but itsn’t even close to being a replacement for Photoshop.
Never claimed it was, and I uninstalled it anyway. I use Krita for my (very light) graphic editing needs.
> At this point I feel that my data is portable enough
Then you’re probably right. At least you’ve looked at the problem that way, which is more than most people do.
— Mark
I suspect somebody’s not going to like this. But never mind Mac, what about Windows programs you really don’t want to give up? What’s the state of play for running something like Parallels on Ubuntu and being able to stick (for the moment) with the Windows programs you know and love. Like for instance, Skype v2.5?
Hi Mark,
I’d like to hear about how your folders are set up; Can Ubuntu be set up so most of the commands are the same or do the same things as on a Mac? How about the permissions, so it’s as secure as a Mac and if you would, talk about how syncing goes, that is, moving from Mac to Ubuntu.
I have half a dozen Macs and would be willing to sell them all and jump to a linux box if my learning curve would be “Here’s the basic Mac architecture, plus all these features, minus these features..for now…” I don’t do web development, so I’m not so concerned about eye candy as I am about having a familiar feature set & having to spend a lot of time at the command line.
Thanks! Great start on the article!
— Josh
Not that it’s directly related to my linux install, but Rockbox is great if you have an iPod. I drooled over the iPod, but wouldn’t buy one because it didn’t support Ogg. Then I found out about Rocbox - two days later I had an iPod.
Also, for the linux machine, I just recently installed a new distro - Arch - and had to make sure it had all my essentials. Beyond your list: I use Opera primarily, but also Firefox. pwsafe is important. It’s not really a user app, but I need Apache. And zsh is my preferred shell. And others have mentioned it, but VIM is a basic requirement. XEmacs too, though - you gotta have both.
— Decasm
> What’s the state of play for running something like Parallels on Ubuntu and being able to stick (for the moment) with the Windows programs
I haven’t tried any of these, but…
QEmu is probably what you’re looking for. The base emulator is open source, but there is also a proprietary-but-no-cost add-on called QEmu Accelerator that works much like Parallels does (programs run on the host CPU instead of an emulated CPU).
Or you could download the proprietary-but-freeware VMWare Player and hack the disk image to install Windows. Search Google for HOWTOs on that.
— Mark
After being nearly 100% *n?x (bsd, then linux) since 1993, I just got a macbook pro. Why? Tired of screen issues (can’t hook up random external display like a projector), power management, and various other persistent and frustrating problems.
I wouldn’t have done this if my m200 with Debian hadn’t been stolen :(, but now I’ll be able to test things with Windows & MacOS X, so I’m prioritizing my audience’s POV as well as my technical/ideological preferences. Oh, and have a slick fast computer.
Anyway that’s how I justify it, maybe I just want to try something new. :) Often I felt with Gnome that their striving for user friendliness - through limited, pre made choices - was turning the desktop into something I didn’t want anyway. This is exemplified on both platforms by hiding the terminal under Utilities, whereas its a main application for a lot of users. The other problem with the open source world being the prominant and background apps come and go (hotplug, xine, etc, etc). However, I’m not going to adopt any non open software (and servers are still Linux based).
Anyway, good luck, and I have little doubt I’ll be be working my way back once I get sick of the glitz.
— davidm
I made the switch from Mac to Linux back in early ‘97 (those were the days!), and the open-format, plain-text-if-you-can habits I developed in my Linux years stayed with me when I moved back to the Mac last year. I wish you well in this new venture, though I believe you could meet your goals on a Mac with fewer hassles.
Oh, I know Emacs has a powerful gravitational pull, but consider NEdit. It has a pretty powerful macro language and rational keyboard equivalents.
[You have the best comment previewer I have ever seen!]
Welcome to Linux, I made the switch from Mac last August and am still enjoying it very much. I did move from Gnome to KDE as the way the GUI works just makes so much more sense to me. I also noticed that you list several KDE applications.
Give Kubuntu a try (ubuntu’s kde brother).
At the moment I run it on an IBM Thinkpad but I am planning to get a MacBook which WILL get Kubuntu on it. Just nice to be able to switch.
So, just so we’re clear… What “proprietary” file formats were you fed up with? I’m really curious, ’cause honestly I don’t see very many that could be called Apple only. Sure there’s formats for certain applications, but isn’t that how it goes with any environment?
— Anonymous
…for backups? backuppc! all the way.
— datakid
My ibm t30 whos original hdd contained xp and ibm recovery tools failed reciently. After frustrating myself for a 3 days trying to reinstall xp, I installed Dapper Ubuntu Its pretty vanilla except for skype.
Installation was simple enough, and most of the programs I used in xp are already installed in Ubuntu. This is a second computer for my wife to web surf wirelessly in the living room and keep me outta the my den. And she can still access my sons baby photos on my other windows machine (via smb) - sweet!
However
I want to play mpg and avi files, but the package mplayer-686 has an GDebi error(Dependancy is not satisfisble: mplayer) and I cannot figure out how to install gcc 2.95.3 used to compile mplayer source. Does anyone have a step by step howto for a n00b like me?
— nada_hax0r
I spend most of my time on WinXP, but more than a trivial amount of time on Mac OS X and Linux. Here are my must-have apps:
Firefox (all platforms) + Greasemonkey + Adblock + BugMeNot + RadialContext + PDF Download + Sage + Chatzilla + SessionSaver + Linky + Disable Targets for Downloads + Copy URL Plus + Always Remember Password + Performancing + MR Tech Disable XPI Install Delay + repagination + Flat bookmark editing + rikaichan + del.icio.us. Greasemonkey scripts: Flickr Related Tags Display, Secure GMail, Weather Underground Reorg, Flickr Remove My Yahoo Link, Flickr Photo Page enhancer, eBay Hacks, eBay Negs, Google Cache Continue, Flickr EXIF.
Hmm, why is Firefox thrashing my disk?
Thunderbird (all platforms) + Enigmail + Sync on arrival + Unselect message + Advanced remove duplicates + Leet key (for the occasional ROT13 punchline) + Mbox import + Attachment tools + Remember mismatched domains (I ssh forward localhost to my smtp and imap servers, this extension supresses the “security certificate for mail.foo.com coming from machine localhost, do you want to trust this?” dialog.
Cygwin (Windows) - I’m not ready to wrestle with Linux on a laptop. I try every few years, and there’s always some mix of sound / video / suspend / power save / wireless that doesn’t work or needs patches / tweaking. Life is too short. WinXP is stable on my notebook and Cygwin gives me 95% of the things I want from a Linux machine: ssh, rsync, wget, GNU textutils, X, Emacs, python, and perl.
I’ve read that you aren’t a graphic designer or web developer? I wonder if anyone know what apps you could find to do this web page and how long it would take to build compared to using Mac OS X. I’m very skeptical that a designer could do it in even the fraction of the time it takes using OS X, but I would love for someone to prove me wrong b/c I’m always open to new ideas and OS platforms if they are worth it (time-wise): [spam removed, please cut it out -Mark]
— Revolution
> Sure there’s formats for certain applications, but isn’t that how it goes with any environment?
No, really it isn’t. There’s nothing preventing an application being written so it stores its data in a non-opaque, well-documented data format.
When applications appear that fail to store all data in open formats, the wise thing to do is avoid them so you keep control of your own data.
When an operating system (or more precisely, its vendor) consistently pushes applications that fail to store all data in open formats, the wise thing to do is escape from that operating system.
— bignose
Try gDesklets…
— one
When an operating system (or more precisely, its vendor) consistently pushes applications that fail to store all data in open formats, the wise thing to do is escape from that operating system.
This is the sort of comment that just drives me up a wall. Look, if the end point for your data is a digital file, this may, sometimes, makes a modicum of sense. But very often the end of the digital data is printed (whether a photo or a brochure designed in Quark XPress), and sometimes even when the file will be digital the open formats are just plain inferior (jpeg and png). This sort of manifesto-like statement is simpleminded, limiting, and incomplete.
— Tim Swan
> Look, if the end point for your data is a digital file, this may, sometimes, makes a modicum of sense.
As I’ve explained at great length in recent posts, the vast majority of data I’m creating is personal, private, extremely important (to me), and strictly digital, and I would like to keep it for at least the next 50 years. This involves a numbers of factors, one of which is open formats.
— Mark
> I want to play mpg and avi files
http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/get.html
— Mark
> I’m not ready to wrestle with Linux on a laptop.
Neither am I. Like all hardware, your best bet is to buy a laptop from a vendor that specifically supports the operating system you want to run on it. (This is not a Linux-specific problem; look at all the driver problems people are having with the 64-bit version of Windows.) There are Linux-friendly OEMs out there.
— Mark
> Try gDesklets
Tried it, hated it, uninstalled it. I never liked Dashboard or Konfabulator either. To each his own.
— Mark
You rock for posting this. I’m planning to install Ubuntu soon, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be obtaining almost everything you listed.
— Emma
Did you find something that pulls/uses/preserves the metadata from iTunes? Thousands and thousands of ratings and tags that don’t get put in id3v2… I’ve thought about writing something myself (got as far as usefully parsing the plist xml) but just haven’t had the time.
> Did you find something that pulls/uses/preserves the metadata from iTunes?
No. In a comment in a previous post, someone recommended http://search.cpan.org/~bdfoy/Mac-iTunes-0.86/ but I haven’t tried it yet.
— Mark
Never mind, the docs say it only works on iTunes 4.5 and earlier. In iTunes 5 Apple changed their format and he hasn’t been able to reverse-engineer it.
— Mark
You could try Gnome Launch Box if you miss Quicksilver that much. Also, I am really curious, why would you prefer Amarok to Quod Libet?
PS In case you ever wondered, here you can find the easyest way to install XGL & Compiz ;).
— toxicduck
Well, the first thing I do when I boot up ubuntu, or any other linux distro other than Gentoo, is try to configure the wireless connection. Most of them find the card, but then provide no gui/touchy feely support for connecting to my WPA secured network at home. They apparently assume that everyone has open ESIDs and wireless routers. Neat. Three versions of Ubuntu haven’t been able to connect to my router. The one time I took the plunge and lovingly compiled Gentoo and manually configured the wireless card (after compiling the drivers no less) I was able to connect to my wireless network. I was so happy. Then the hard drive went tits up.
The second thing I usually do is install the latest version of Fluxbox. I love that WM. Some day I’ll have to research how to run a different wm under OS X.
— Scott
Add:
Gnome Lunar Clock.
Awesome moon tracking application - tells me exactly what phase the moon is in, and counts down the next full moon to the second. CRITICALLY IMPORTANT when you have a girlfriend like mine, who becomes irrational and snappy every full moon.
My life was one big emotional mess untill I docked GnomeLunarClock on my daily desktop.
— SteveOC
Gotta have something to play, so get Oolite for Linux!
— aegidian
> but then provide no gui/touchy feely support for connecting to my WPA secured network at home
I haven’t used it personally, but does NetworkManager do what you need? If not, could you explain to me what it’s missing?
— Mark
> 57 - What about the Airport card in my iBook G4? Is that fully supported?
I think the standard Airport cards have been supported for some time. Airport Extreme cards are supported by the default Dapper kernel but you need to install the firmware from the Mac OS X driver. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Dapper
— David O'C
Mark, what’s your beef with Unison?
— Mic Edwards
So, Mac users are fanboys? What about the Linux users? They seem to be even more based in fandom than even the most determined Mac zealots.
I understand that you have minimal requirements for your software, but those who work with professional-grade graphics and video just could not do their work with the software available for Linux. Does that make them fanboys? I wonder why you feel the need to condescend so much. It seems your choices are based on ego and ideology rather than practicality.
Mac users don’t generally go around calling Linux users derogative names. Why so much hatred towards people that use different tools than you?
— Harvard Irving
This is all pretty interesting. I’ve been using Debian on my ThinkPads for years, but was considering switching to Mac out of convenience, especially because I’ve always had tons of trouble getting hibernation to work.
Is there a hibernation solution with Ubuntu + Lenovo TP?
Good to see you’ve made the switch to Linux. I’ve been running linux for years, and have been using it solely at home for over a year now (gentoo).
Last October my girlfriend bought me an Apple ipod (5g video) for my birthday. So I tried a handful of iTunes replacements including amaroK gtkpod and rhythmbox which I found to be good but buggy and not quite what I wanted. gnupod worked quite well but, I found that what was limiting me was the ipod and it’s itunes index. I wanted it to operate more like a file browser so I did some digging and found rockbox.
Rockbox is an excellent opensource operating system for a whole variety of mp3 players including the ipod. It plays mp3, oggs and a whole lot more, and it allows you to store the files on your ipod how you want. It can easily be mounted in linux, and scripts can easily be written to sync to it.
The only minor problem is that I don’t think it supports video playback yet.
I’ve never looked back. Rather than using a graphical podcatcher for synchronising podcasts, I opted to cobble together my own solution. I use podget (a bash script for downloading mp3s) and an XSLT file to strip my bloglines subscription opml to seperate my podcasts from my regular rss items. I then have another script to sync the files to ipod appropriately. For me this setup works really well as I can use my bloglines bookmarklet to subscribe to podcasts and have them sync up to my ipod later.
An alternative to rockbox is ipodlinux, which at the time didn’t properly support the 5g ipod, though I believe progress is being made.
— Rick
All the things you say are ok… BUT I have just 2 reasons for not using only Ubuntu on my powerbook:
- No Airport Extreme support.
- No Energy-saving/Sleeping mode stuff management.
That was enough for me to erase my Ubuntu partition. I know it is not Ubuntu team fault but Apple for not releasing specs about these technologies, but anyway…
— anhelido
Does anyone still use Galeon? It’s one bit of software I missed when switching back to the Mac. I noticed it’s in the Ubuntu repositories.
Of course, those were pre-Firefox days.
For wireless connections, check out wpagui. It lets you browse for wireless networks. I still needed to configure network preferences/security manually (there was flux in what daemons/config files to edit at the time).
And in case you need it, pptpconfig is a nice VPN frontend.
Glad to see all these people switching, of course being a contrarian contrarian I take this time to switch away, but its just for a break.
— davidm
Great, lovely. But if you’ve got the time to wade through all those endless installations, good luck to you. You have no social life, right? My Mac does everything out of the box, so I can go and talk to some real people.
— NotDweeb
Mark, you should consider updating your instructions to use aptitude instead of apt-get. Aptitude remembers and differentiates between the packages you selected for installation and the packages which were installed as dependencies. When you use aptitude to remove a package, it also removes the unused dependencies that were installed with it. Now, if you use apt-get for a while and end up with a lot of extra packages, you can use deborphan to list your orphaned packages, and then remove them manually. But if you use aptitude from the get-go, it will never be a problem.
Now that you’ve updated to use Konsole, I’ll suggest you check out Yakuake: http://packages.debian.org/unstable/kde/yakuake
I find it to be the most important thing I install in Linux; have a terminal (with tabs) that I can just slide in and out of the desktop, independent of desktop window, is huge time-saver for me.
Like many people, I have been watching the furor surrounding Mark’s migration from OS X to ubuntu with interest. I’ve been a Debian user since the mid nineties, and have several hundred debian servers in production around the world. I have, however, always used apple powerbooks for my portable requirements. OS7-9 were woeful to be sure, but the 3600c and the pismo made fine linux platforms. When I upgraded to a G4 17, I installed OS X for the first time since the developer’s beta of 10.0 and was glad to see that they had remedied many of the performance problems, disk I/O and VM aside. I lived with tiger since I bought this machine in september, but I’m a unix user at heart, and OS X is a terrible unix environment. The package management (ports, fink, dmg, blah) make me want to remove my own eyes with something crafted out of stone by a neolithic man.
So, that’s a long winded introduction to an answer to a question asked by somebody earlier in the comments. When I removed OS X from my machine, the migration was very straight forward:
*terminal*
(you did enable the root account, right?)
$su -
#cd /Users && #tar -cvf /Volumes/External_disk/homedir.tar ./my_home_dir
#verify the tarball
*format the disk*
*install ubuntu*
*create the first UID to match your short username on OS X*
*mount the external disk (HFS+ is read fine)*
$su -
#cd /mnt/External_disk
#tar xvf homedir.tar -C /home
… then weed through the resulting directory removing all of the metadata associated with various OS X applications. There’s a lot of chaff in the directory listing, and much of it can go the way of the dodo (~me/Library for insance). If you have any shell customisations, these will be tracked over, and you’ll be able to migrate your media and other important data by associating them with the relevant applications (amaroK etc).
*imo* OS X is probably a poor operating system for anybody who actually uses (X)emacs on a regular basis for anything like development of software. With all the talk from people about a “killer application for linux”, it’s easy enough to point out: emacs is king. It’s more important to me than photoshop or office or dreamweaver or xcode or just about anything else, and it’s support in OS X is weak at best. */imo*
To NotDweeb:
Perhaps you don’t realise how ridiculously easy and quick it is to carry out “all those endless installations” on a modern Debian-based desktop like Ubuntu. I seriously doubt it would have much impact on anyone’s social life. On the other hand, it sounds like installing new programs must be a real chore on the Mac for you to leap to this ignorant and erroneous conclusion.
Perhaps that’s another good reason to consider switching to Ubuntu — You can actually try out a variety of different programs (rather than using the OS defaults), without giving up your social life trying to get them installed!
— Norm
Whee. Fun to watch the fireballs fly.
There are some obvious conclusions:
Both platforms (Mac OS & Linux) have a lot of diversity, strength and weaknesses, and their own issues that affect different people in different ways.
It’s difficult to argue that in nearly every case, free/open source is not the better way, technically and idealistically. *Provided* the system runs well and does what is needed, for a particular user. Statements such as “Emacs is king” are just *hilarious* when I think of the average user’s requirements, especially when compared to specialized apps such as Photoshop (Oh, just write a Lisp macro to speak to GIMP’s python macros.. you’ll need Python 2.5.1 installed, not 2.5.2. Just read this 47 page discussion about it here, and join channel #leet-script-fu-splitters and talk to Foobah-the-great about how to get Python to not trip over backslashes. Yeah.) (Yes I know you said IMO, but this attitude still pervades, and I think the four people reading this who use Emacs already know how to switch their OS).
The flames arise when people are inconsiderate of other’s priorities, for example, having a completely reliable, prebuilt environment without extensive yak-shaving, having full access to their data, a sense of purity, ego/machismo, bad experiences, cultural or technical entrenchment (it *is* hard to reach a plateau). Etc.
Assuming free will (and data lock-in can prevent this), I really don’t think anyone is “right” here, and find it disgusting when people resort to name calling. Mark started the name calling, which sets a disrespectful tone for the rest of the conversation.
Frankly, it is ridiculous. If the computer community can find a way to respond to these differences, that would be at least as great a thing as open source software. Perhaps a cohesive description of a responsible operating system, involving open data formats, etc, etc would be more useful than all this flammage.
— davidm
Mozilla Firefox + [...]. Damn it, why is Firefox taking 600 MB?
Firefox memory usage is somehow flawed in version 1.5.x (and it was not really good in version 1.0.x). I hope it will be much improved in version 2.0 (alpha versions already available).
> Firefox memory usage is somehow flawed in version 1.5.x
There were a number of memory leaks in 1.5 which were identified and fixed with the help of a leak detector extension that one of the core developers wrote a few months ago. But many popular extensions leak memory like a sieve, which gives Firefox a bad name even though it’s somebody else’s fault.
> version 2.0 (alpha versions already available)
You do realize that I’m a full-time Firefox developer, right? That link to nightly builds is the second link on my bookmarks toolbar! I don’t really recommend nightlies for the general public, though. Beta 1 is coming out in a few weeks and will be much more stable than some random nightly build.
— Mark
> Statements such as “Emacs is king” are just *hilarious* when I think of the average user’s requirements,
An excellent point, but I’ve personally written over 1500 pages (including two published books) in Emacs, and I’m not done yet. I am not an average user.
> Mark started the name calling, which sets a disrespectful tone for the rest of the conversation.
I could try to defend myself by pointing to the copious examples of rude behavior by Mac users — nay, fanboys — in previous posts, but why bother? It’s my blog, and it’s my tone to set. I must have missed the part where I was put under any obligation towards you whatsoever.
— Mark
Hey Mark,
It’s not like there aren’t rude Linux users. Am not sure that return name calling has been proven to be constructive.
But… it’s your blog, it’s your tone to set, it’s your position being the instigator of a topic that’s important to many people.
Just like it’s your ISP’s bandwidth… no, wait.
— davidm
Mark,
I haven’t tried that network manager. All the distros I’ve tried have been KDE oriented, except for Gentoo but I was going for a minimalist system when I installed that one. I’m using WPA on my network and so far all of the gui wireless managers for linux I’ve tried only support WEP. I may have to switch back to WEP.
Why am I concerned about gui tools? Well, the people in my life that would be using my computer aren’t techies so it needs to be easy. IMO, wireless networking doesn’t get much easier than with OS X. So if a gui wireless manager for Linux doesn’t at least get me connected to my home network in two or three clicks, I’m not going to consider it. Heck, even Windows gets that right most of the time. :)
— Scott
Scott, as mentioned above, try wpagui. I used it on Debian and it was fine, though you have to do some hand editing behind the scenes.
— davidm
Hey look now we’ve got an ubuntu fanboy site
— ubuntu fanboy
You forgot auto-matix or how ever it is spelled. I haven’t looked to closely at Easy-Ubuntu but automatix is a script that installs codex, nataulis scripts and much much more gets nearly evrey app you will ever need.
— Tarrant
DavidM,
Thanks. I’ll give that a try.
— Scott
> IMO, wireless networking doesn’t get much easier than with OS X
Agreed. Every other platform is still playing catch-up, including Linux. (I don’t personally care, since my new computer is a desktop and is plugged directly into my switch, but I acknowledge the problem.)
— Mark
What about a tool for downloading binaries from newsgroups? I use NewsBin on Windows, what is a good alternative for Linux?
— Clint
Hey, you do know that you can download gmail via pop to thunderbird right? and then the thunderbird email notification icon covers all your accounts.
— nobody
for those GNOME lovers, who want something like Yakuake:
apt-get install tilda
( or get it from gnomefiles.org)
it’s freaking awesome ;)
— Goll
I had just downloaded the ISO for Xubuntu Desktop CD for PowerPC, so I could try it out before installing, but it was 690+ meg and my CD-R blanks were only 650 Meg. Rats! Oh, well, there’s always Darwin. 8)
— Buxton Pyland
Nice collection Mark, i use Kubuntu cuz’ i like KDE and have a similar choice of apps. I recomend KOffice, it’s nicer than OpenOffice and it works faster.
“Automatix” it’s better than “EasyUbuntu” but it’s still “ugly” for me, but it works! and it’s updated (see ubuntuforums.org)
And if you want games you have a lot of new FPS with nice 3D, look at this and this
For graphics design, there’s a new version of Inkscape 0.44 (Vector design) and this software may not be professional but it’s going to be…
— Fabio
It is probably not the best idea for the old Mac-lover (or whatever is currently PC term for long-time Mac user), but I would add to the list of applications I cannot live without Krusader (or probably gnome-commander, but that is still years behind) — more than competent replacement for Windows Commander (two-pane OFM file manager). Yes, I don’t like Konqueror as a file manager, but Nautilus makes me remember horrible times of Windows 3.0. Never again!
Update: I just downloaded the ISO for Debian “Sarge” NetInst for PowerPC. At 195 Meg, it’s rather svelte compared to the Xubuntu ISO. I didn’t see a similar offering from Ubuntu.
I’ve used Debian for the PC, as well as a dozen others over the years (I cut my teeth on Slackware 8) ). I’m really impressed by their package management system, and how it handles dependencies. Once I make a backup of my data, I’ll give it a whirl.
— Buxton Pyland
For image editing a la photoshop and better check out XaraLX:
— saracen
I heard that Ubuntu doesn’t support wireless internet… thats the main thing putting me off at the moment as all my laptops and computers are wireless.
— Jaymz
> I heard that Ubuntu doesn’t support wireless internet
Many wireless cards are supported, but not all of them. This is definitely an area where Linux is struggling to catch up. The best thing to do is download a “live CD” of Ubuntu and boot it on your own laptop. It won’t touch your existing hard drive at all — it does everything off the CD and in memory — and you can run a full Linux distribution and see whether it supports your hardware.
— Mark
I just wanted to tell folks about Dia:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/
Anyone doing any data modelling, interface design, IA work… etc.
There is also Graphviz:
http://www.graphviz.org/
Graphviz can be scripted… which is good if you can automate any part of your modelling process… (sitemaps, SQL schemas, etc.)
Shawn
While this is in fact your site and you may indeed set any tone you like, doing so authorizes the rest of us to add such tone to whatever ongoing list of petty cruelties issued by the formerly vaunted and esteemed Mark Pilgrim that w