So, thanks to Wubi (http://wubi-installer.org/) I have installed Ubuntu 8.04, though using a virtual disk image. After I get my hard drive enclosure here from newegg, I'm going to backup my hard drive and transfer my Wubi image onto a real linux partition.

In the meantime, I'm looking for software recommendations. Here's what I'm looking at:

DVD player software--I don't have a particular favorite Windows program

Text Editor--I really like Crimson Editor. GEdit seems to work, but I wonder if there's a better choice for PHP editing.

Music player. I want something minimalistic like Foobar2000. One that can play Mp3 as well.

FTP program---I use FileZilla on Windows, but I imagine that it won't take long for me to find one that works.

Any other software? Or any other advice? I've been using Firefox, Thunderbird (though I am going to try out Evolution on Linux), Pidgin, and GIMP for Windows for a long time.

I suggest an operating system other than linux. Seriously.

Video: Xine/MPlayer
Text: Kate
Audio: Amarok
FTP: Konqueror
Email: KMail

Also, I suggest that you ignore Rob.

How about WinXP, which I still have?

It does do everything you're asking linux to do. Without nearly as much work or time.

Use it until the novelty wears off

and you realize that Windows has better applications and a better kernel and even though it has lousy security you can do so much more with it that it's worth the annual reformat, and that Ubuntu will require an annual reformat anyway because apt does a poor job at housekeeping and a dist-upgrade is almost definitely going to nuke something anyway so there's really no benefit no matter what way you cut it

Here's why using Linux probably isn't a good idea:

You'll install it, think it's all cool and stuff. Then you'll install all the software you need to try and match your windows experience. Then there will be something missing. Either it'll be non-working hardware, incompatible software, or just plain annoyances. You'll fight with it, google endlessly for solutions, and eventually give up.

You'll realize that Linux isn't all that it cracked up to be, you'll find yourself trying to run Windows apps because Linux simply isn't working out, and finally you'll realize it was all a waste of time and go back.

More power to you if you stick with it, but seriously, very few people "try" Linux and continue to use it on a daily basis.

For DVD player: VLC, although you will have to do a little configuring to make it play DVD's automatically on Ubuntu 8.04.

The real reason Linux sucks is because there's no killer app, and there's absolutely zero chance of it ever appearing.

Linux is a terrible platform to target - it's schizophrenic. The APIs are inconsistent, the userbase is fragmented, and even between distributions using 99% common code the remaining 1% is invariably a custom job package manager so if you want your installer to be more robust than a makefile you have to upload 300 versions of the same program.

Speaking of makefiles, GCC is trash and I really wish the opensource world would figure out that "it can run any language on any machine including a lever and a pulley" is not the same thing as quality; -Os actually results in snappier performance than -O3 because the GCC optimizer is so useless that improving disk access times will yield better results, which is stupid. Maybe it'd work better if they allowed multiple optimization passes but... OOPS! Change is bad! If you want to do any high performance Linux development you have to buy a copy of ICC.

The scheduler is completely disingenuous for a desktop computer and the ill-contrived segregation of the X server/windowing manager from the kernel means that no amount of tweaking will make Linux perform as well on the desktop as Windows does. Windows has microkernel messaging like Mach, which it uses to pass window manager events to applications, all of which put themselves in an alertable state while waiting for these events. X11? BLOCKING ON A STREAM. HAHAHAHA.

And even after all these years there still isn't a single opensource IDE as good as Visual Studio and Xcode - which is probably related to the fact that most opensource developers are under the extremely mistaken impression that you can be just as productive coding in XEmacs. You really can't.

So basically what I'm saying is that Linux would be a lot better if GNU thickies would get it through their heads that, while freedom is good, the pursuit of freedom to the exclusion of all else is pretty damn stupid.

I'm on summer break and Wubi allowed me to install Linux without much trouble. I guess I'll spend some more time with it before making it permanent (the Wubi install is supposed to run about as well as normal, and I haven't noticed too much slowness). I'm not even considering replacing Windows with it any time soon.

I may ultimately give up on Linux as many of you have, but I'm not worried about "wasting my time" with it. Wasting my time is half the reason for doing it. It's the summer.

At first I thought I really liked Ubuntu, but it started to wear on me a bit when I realized the fonts were hurting my eyes. I'll definitely have to get some TrueType fonts going, but it is kind of a hassle to have to do that. I can kind of see where some of you are coming from.

But TrueType isn't open! It's not FREEE!!

Richard Stallman actually said that charging money for software is a "crime against humanity."

Well, I'll never be a true Linux user since my conception of free is more like "free of charge."

music player... i like rhythmbox...
dvds... VLC is the best i've found
if you're used to thunderbird in windows it's worth the 5 seconds to ditch evolution and install thunderbird

also gbk must be using kde because all his recommendations are kde apps which tend to load and run a bit slower in gnome

Um, just for the record, all this linux bashing is total BS. I've been using linux for years and it's far superior to the windows experience. The only thing I don't do on linux is play windows-only games (I do play all the quakes/dooms/unreal tournaments natively on linux). If you aren't going to be doing gaming, it's a far superior platform for development (especially web development). It's much easier to get things like apache, mod_perl, mod_php, mysql, postgres, etc., running and configured properly on linux. There are so many awesome software packages that windows simply can't compare to. The power of the command line and all the cool command line tools is just awesome.

If you come to linux hoping for it to be exactly like windows, of course you're going to be disappointed. It's NOT windows. It never will be. You can make it looks and act mostly like windows, but why would you want to? You're missing the whole point if you get linux and then "tweak" it so it just acts like windows.

And no, you don't have to reformat every year like on windows. Debian in particular I've been running for years, happily upgrading on a regular basis, and only running into a few minor problems. Once you know wtf you are doing this is not an issue.

And in linux, they make it easy to find out what's going wrong. My wifes XP laptop doesn't get past the boot screen half the time. How do I know wtf is wrong ??? Where's the log file? Where's the output so I can see what's loading when it crashes? Oh wait, it's all ****ing hidden. Yay for windows.

Also for the record, no, linux on the desktop is not as responsive as a clean windows (not counting vista, never used it). But every windows installation I've seen is so loaded with systray programs that it performs way worse than your typical linux box. It's virtually impossible for a linux program to install and run itself w/out you knowing about it. And there are only a small number of well-documented places for programs to put themselves so they will run on startup. You don't need to download 85 shareware programs to "tweak" linux to do what you want it to do.

And screw visual studio and xcode. I hardly think these are the be-all-and-end-all of IDEs. Jedi Legend is talking about WEB DEVELOPMENT, if you want to do web development in visual studio you seriously have a head problem.

Jedi Legend, probably the font issues you are talking about aren't a result of the lack of true type fonts (although you can get the microsoft fonts like verdana, tahoma, etc., by installing the package msttcorefonts or something). It's probably the anti-aliasing setting. For some reason mac & linux folks tend to like blurry fonts as opposed to sharp ones. If you're using UBUNTU there is a setting in gnome to tweak the anti-aliasing settings. I think don't know whether ubuntu ships with "font hinting" support enabled in fontconfig/freetype, but if not it's pretty easy to enable and then all your fonts look just like in windows.

I have issues with this in many forms.

While indeed Linux is a great server platform, it does not have decent IDEs for development. Eclipse is as good as it gets, and I even find that lacking compared to far more centralized programs on Windows and OSX (such as PHPEdit on Windows and Coda on OSX). Unfortunately, most of the editors on Linux are just glorified vi/nano editors with a GUI.

This was mostly the point I believe everyone was trying to make. Tons of people switch to Linux expecting a similar experience to Windows, only to be sorely disappointed. It's the same reason many people have issue with OSX.

Knowing "wtf you're doing" is a good portion of the reason as to why Linux is still not a great desktop program. I shouldn't have to have intimate knowledge of the OS to get my job done.

Expanding upon what I said above, how is having a crapload of log files to wade through, each with their own formats, archaic codes and messages, and lacking documentation a better way of computing? What's even better is when an error occurs, and you have no idea what caused it. Not everything is logged, and sometimes the issue at hand appears hours before the consequences.

Windows may occassionally have issues, but I know with a good amount of certainty that the system is going to remain just as functional as I left it the night before. And I'll be getting work done, instead of debugging beta applications and incompatible services.

Oh, and let's not forget that Windows does have logs, it's called the Event Viewer.

Actually there are quite a few nasty ways to get programs to start up on boot. And Linux is not without it's numerous miscellaneous services that the average home user simply doesn't need running.

Also, you may not need shareware, but you do need a lot of freeware. I find a default Linux install to be terribly lacking in numerous areas.



Actually VS would be great if it had support for, say, PHP built in. Not to mention, as I posted above, Linux has far more limited options for decent web development IDEs than windows does. OSX has a few also, and they're really slick.



Which is also technically illegal (OSX does not use this style of anti-aliasing for this reason. Microsoft owns a patent on Cleartype-style AA). Also, if I remember correctly, the ubuntu option is non-functional without tweaks.

%SystemRoot%\System32\Winevt\Logs\System.evtx

The hell it is. I can get an all-in-one installer that does Apache, MySQL and a variety of modules, including mod_perl and mod_php in one click. Or I can get individual installers for them. I can also choose not to use any installer and do it manually. It's extremely easy.


That's the fault of OEMs who preload the system, not Windows itself.


You don't need to do that on Windows either. Tweak programs have always been useless bull****, save beyond some UI customization. And then, you don't need them at all, they are just frontends. I don't see how digging through the registry is really more difficult that changing a value on line 335 in /etc/x11/org/conf/x11r6/wtf/blerg/xorg.conf just to get your fourth and fifth mouse buttons working.


Have you ever developed a large web application? I mean a real web application? Visual Studio is fantastic for web development, but it naturally only supports ASP.NET. Aptana is an IDE that provides similar functionality for numerous other frameworks, and it's very productive for web development.


If you think antialiasing is "blurry" then you need a new monitor. I have a mid range CRT from the last century and even on that antialiased fonts are far better than not.


What's interesting is that if, with Windows, you know "wtf you're doing" you'll find that it is actually a very customizable platform. It's just that most people, even developers, aren't very familiar with it. It's documented, you just have to take the time to look.

I'm not going to reply to all your comments above, clearly you A) have differing opinions and B) haven't used linux seriously for very long, but I do take issue with one of the comments:

I've been doing web development "professionally" for years. I'm not talking about Massassi, a small web site I built in my spare time starting something like ten years ago. I'm talking about jobs I get paid for. I've got a long and interesting CV and I've only once ever interviewed for a job and not had it offered to me (and that wasn't based on technical merit). You guys seem to have some interesting ideas of what I do for a living and how "smart" or "experienced" I am (based on this post and others from a small group of people).

Currently I write software for a biotech in seattle that does data management and genetic analysis. Yes, it has a web interface. You could consider it a "web application" but you would be an idiot if you thought that was all it was. There's probably ~100,000-~150,000 lines of mod_perl code, something like 180 tables in the database (which by the way, we support multiple databases, oh, and the software runs on and is distributed for multiple platforms -- not just linux). We've got daemon processes that support all types of genetic experiments, and my most current development project is for what are considered "next generation" sequencing instruments that output literally terabytes of data -- project is a detached grid of computers that can do these analysis jobs for multiple clients (since their in-house machines aren't really up to it).

I've worked on everything from ecommerce to content management, build systems, distribution systems, daemon processes, integration, you name it. I'm neck deep in makefiles, spec files, crappy "ajax" javascript stuff, mod_perl/mod_perl2, etc.

Don't talk to me about how stupid visual studio is the best way to get things done. Millions of developers would disagree with you (and millions would agree -- the point is that there is no consensus on this issue). There are legions of extremely talented people who develop on vim and/or emacs and get way more stuff done than you do.

Mucking around in a zillion wizards and code-generation applets using the mouse pointer and dialog boxes doesn't sound like fun to me. Yes, I've tried visual studio numerous times over the years, and never have I thought, "wow, this is really great, I'd rather use this than vim." On the contrary.

All this crap about how windows is so powerful - give me a break! Tell me how to mount an ext3 filesystem from a different machine on windows over an ssh connection. Tell me how to run multiple gui programs from multiple external computers on a local windows monitor. Seamlessly. People give x/x.org a bad wrap because it's hard to configure -- but it's some powerful crap that makes my job much, much easier.

You guys don't know linux. You used it a few days maybe and gave up because it wasn't like windows. You are not some expert on linux who is somehow qualified to piss and moan any time someone asks a question about it. Instead of making vague generalities and statements of opinion disguised as fact, how about you simply describe your experience with it and let Jedi Legend make up his own mind?

I work with a lot of smart, qualified people. Not one of them uses Windows for development. We have a 50/50 split of linux & osx, not one windows box on the dev or QA teams, as far as I know. I guess we're all wrong and you're right.

The very fact that you love Perl so much speaks volumes about you as a developer. Perl used to be a great language over a decade ago but now it's a worthless pile of crap. Anyone who uses purposely uses Perl (i.e. the requirements of an existing system don't require it, the system is already in Perl etc) is most likely an idiot. There are so many better, more modern solutions. Oh, I know what you'll say next! "There are thousands of really talented programmers that use nothing but Perl and they get a lot more done with it that you do with C#/Java/other crap." :downs: Or maybe "Bah, you damn kids think you know everything!"


Edgar Dijkstra probably used vi or Emacs. He was a brilliant computer scientist. I also suspect he was a terrible programmer, since he went on to call OOP a useless fad. Anyone who actually develops software knows that's a goddamn lie.


I did that over the course of the last year since some of my project material was located on a (I think) Solaris machine. SftpDrive makes it extremely easy to do so. Of course, it's not free, but you could always use Cygwin, although it's a little inconvenient at times.


I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a solution out there that uses the RDP protocol to do something similar.


Of course it's powerful. It's just not practical for home users, which is what we're talking about.


I ran either Gentoo, Debian or Ubuntu from 2004 through 2006. I still use it daily in the labs at school. Actually, I use Solaris, but it's close enough.


Just a few paragraphs ago you seemed to be bashing the use of anecdotal evidence (in favor of Visual Studio) and now you're using it? Hey, guess what, they are also huge firms that use almost nothing but Microsoft software. I guess they're all wrong and you're right! :downs:

Also, no one is "Linux bashing." I think Linux is great, just not as a desktop platform, which is what JL is trying it as. I think, especially with Wubi, that there's no reason not to try it. I just get a little annoyed when you come in here with your "WAA I USE LINUX AND PERL AS MY JOB AND I KNOW A BUNCH OF PEOPLE THAT ARE SMARTER THAN YOU" like you do every god damn time. You never even bother refuting the points that Jon`C makes in such threads, only wail out garbage.

Command line's awesome eh? Before apt-get, this is how **** was done.


People are use to the look and feel of what they were doing. Almost all new "Linux users" are users of Windows. That means they are used to the interface, the UI. Now they try out a new operating system with a COMPLETELY different look and feel. That's a learning curve. I've tried various amounts of window managers. Enlightment, Blackbox, FVWM, IceWM. To me, they all sucked. Inconsitancies, difficult functionality. Why do you think Gnome/KDE is pretty much standard? It looks like Windows! People can easily learn from what they see is familiar!

People who reformat their machines every year are doing something wrong. You should never ever have to reformat your HDD. If your machine is being loaded up with a bunch of ****, your fault. The only time I reformat is if I bricked something hardcore or I upgrade. XP -> Vista prime example.


I would probably spending just as much time on Google as you would trying to find out where that program/OS stores the log files assuming fresh to Linux.

This is true. I've never had to reinstall Vista because it's gotten "slow" over time. I've had to reinstall Vista because I bricked something because I'm a moron. XP did have that problem, but you could actually do system profiling and figure out what's going wrong and fix it. But for most everyone a reinstall is so fast and easy that it's not a problem. I also think people like the feeling of a "fresh" install and starting over. I know I kind of do. I don't mean that people would reformat just for that, but if something goes wrong it's just another reason to give up and reinstall.

CoolMatty re: cleartype:

I don't think the cleartype patent is really that explicit. The primary difference between windows and OSX style is that cleartype in windows uses more hinting (trying to fit letters cleanly into pixel grids). Unless there is something special about font hinting microsoft has no such patent. OSX itself uses subpixel antialiasing on all of its fonts so I think it's safe to say Microsoft doesn't have a patent on that either.

There's a tradeoff involved in font hinting where the whitespace between letters gets screwed up and as such the letters are not properly spaced. On OSX the whitespace is correct, although the text seems somewhat more "blurry". Theoretically, as DPI on screens increases, the OSX way will be more true to the fonts. But really, the windows way should end up looking the same on a theoretically infinite resolution screen.

So in this case Brian is right, it comes down to a preference in font rendering I'm pretty sure. This fact is supported by the fact that Safari in Windows uses Apple font rendering in an attempt to bring their "correct" fonts to windows

Read more: http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html

I agree, but for different reasons. I think there have been several killer app's developed on linux but since most of these applications are opensource, they are quickly ported to other platforms.

Windows users get many of the benefits, without all of the headaches.

I would say that if you're trying to do web development with mod_php or mod_perl you have a serious head problem.

I'm sick of the "i've been doing this professionally for years" argument. It has no bearing on whether you're actually any good or not. I'm not saying Brian isn't a good programmer but the arguments he makes are completely irrelevant to making the case.

I guess I should have qualified my statements about Visual Studio.

No, if you develop in a language that is actually supported by Xcode or Visual Studio using vi or xemacs, you cannot be as productive.

I also wasn't criticizing X because it's "hard to configure", I was criticizing it on its technical merits (i.e. "none"). And when I was talking about tweaking I wasn't talking about the kind of tweaking that Windows and OSX and you users do, I was talking about the ****storm on lkml about fixing the scheduler to make gui applications more responsive. I guess I forgot to mention that.

I am not some young whippersnapper who doesn't know what he's talking about.

And if your biotech employer tolerates you writing hundreds of thousands of lines of perl code, whoever takes over your job when you quit is probably going to hunt you down with a shotgun. This is the sort of thing that you read about on jeff atwood's blog.

That's the thing though.

For a Linux killer app to be a Linux killer app, there has to be some advantage to running it on Linux over another platform. There's really nothing on the platform that's interesting to a desktop app developer, and a whole volume of drawbacks which I've already mentioned.

To be more specific, though: if you're writing a desktop app you have to choose between KDE and Gnome, and there's basically no way that someone's going to run your app if they're running the other one.

To use a KDE application under Gnome you literally have to install the entire KDE metapackage except KWM and the KDE dock, which is absurd! KDE uses a custom everything, even its own sound engine that does nothing but provide a thin interface to alsa (KDE 3) or other wms' custom sound engines (KDE 4).

The bad part is that it would be a good thing - if the rest of the Linux world had pulled their heads out of their freedom orifice and adopted it! KIOSlaves are wonderful. Most of Qt is, and being able to use KDE unrestrained would give developers lease to use much better tools - like KDevelop and Qt Designer (which both hopelessly outclass Anjuta and Glade).

As it stands right now, though, it's much easier to ask users to pull in lightweight components like gstreamer and gtk but it's still a little aggrivating because, in spite of the efforts of opendesktop.org, gtk apps still don't play nice with the kde look and feel.

Have I mentioned in the last 10 seconds that linux is a god awful desktop os?

But guys, I've only ever used linux for a couple of days and I don't know what I'm talking about, so maybe you should ignore me when I talk about developing real desktop applications for linux in C and C++ :downs:

It's funny how Mono is the best development platform for Linux, and it's an implementation of Microsoft's .NET platform.

Yeah, but if you're using Mono you're almost definitely using Gtk#, which means you're not really fixing the problem.

Something is very wrong when I agree with Jon'C.

And let's not even get into how Mono is an absolute mind**** in trying to get it functional. I've had more trouble getting mono running on my webserver than I have any other plugin or module of anything, ever.

Oh, and hasn't Perl been completely tossed out the wayside for better scripting languages like Python already?

I never had any trouble getting mono.

Oh wait..

I just make one fresh install, add all the things I like, then make a drive image.

My idea of reinstalling windows is moving all my other files to a large external then copying a drive image.

"restore points"

Did they make restore points not suck?

I'm not interested in being a nerd and picking sides to bash the other.

As of right now I am making this post in Windows Vista. And Windows Vista is alright.

Yet I love linux and would use that as my O.S. of choice. I don't play games on computers anymore. Hell I decided to not be around computers much more. Linux is great for me because it loads faster, I have not encountered any security threat yet, it's free, and I use it for what I need to.

Yeah, Windows can do more. But you get what you pay for...kinda. If you asked me to choose between spending hundreds of dollars on Windows XP/Vista and Linuxdistributionhere, I would choose the latter. Linux does everything I want it to do (Music, IM, chat, and neat effects/looks pretty).

I actually find reformats/new versions fun. I get to do something with my computer! Hurray! I guess some people wouldn't like it, but I rather enjoy backing up things to my second hard drive, reformatting, and installing the new version of <insertlinuxdistrohere>. It also feels like a fresh new start.

Also, with each improvement Ubuntu does, the "Searching for solutions to problems" thing said over and over in this thread becomes easier. Ubuntu (the first distro I used) is VERY user friendly, and continues to become easier every six months with a growing community and newer features and updates.

And if you can't find a solution, the forums or their wikipedia entries help a lot.

Therefore, the "getting headaches" thing is an obsolete argument...because I have not found a single thing I couldn't solve. Hell, even finding something like setting ALSA drivers (which have changed, need I remind you) to detect my USB amp/headphones and change that to the default sound driver was found pretty damn easy.

Ubuntu isn't the only user friendly distro anymore either, Fedora 9 looks pretty damn close to Ubuntu and is just as easy.

I used to be on the vi-only bandwagon, but after being spoiled by Eclipse and Visual Studio at work, I can definitely see the merits of an IDE. As soon as you start working on something nontrivial, things like code completion and automated code refactoring can save you a ton of time. The only things I miss are the vi key bindings and a snappy response time (Visual Studio seems quick enough, but Eclipse is pretty damn slow and bloated).



That probably has more to do with mediocre scheduler designs that Ingo Molnar keeps pushing into the kernel. They should look for some inspiration from the much more robust schedulers in Solaris and FreeBSD.



I work in an analysis shop at Lockheed and I have already run into this problem. Perl is used extensively for parsing data from simulations, building batch runs, etc. While I do not think it is difficult at all to write readable and maintainable Perl (I did it all the time before I started full-time work on simulation development), most of the other developers here are not so careful. Of course, what I mean by developers is random engineers who do not understand the value of indentation, good variable names, comments, OOD, efficient algorithms, etc. They hack up scripts for random tasks and it always ends up looking like crappy Fortran77 with Perl garbage sprinkled in. I think the real problem is that Perl is just too complicated and convoluted of a language for most people to develop applications in; they should probably stick to something a bit nicer to work in like Python.