I

dropped Windows in December 2006. At the time, Ubuntu Feisty was in beta and I upgraded to it from my initial Edgy Eft install. While I had used Linux for 4-month intervals from 1997 onward, this was my experience in jumping ship entirely.

I have learned a lot—both about Linux and about my own desktop usage—in the past two years. This post is my opportunity to share these with you, the reader.

Lesson 1: Do not customize

Linux is hailed as the customizer’s friend. Most applications store their data in user-editable INI-like files. Root has the power to overwrite any ugly image that offends your optic nerves. If something is shittily organized, you can always reprogram and recompile it to make a sensivle UI as I did with MadEdit.

However, as on Windows, these customizations are temporary.

What I mean is that there is no effective way to preserve your changes during upgrades, and there is no way to collect or save these changes when you need to reinstall your system—especially once you begin tap dancing outside /home/.

Once outside your own user directory, all bets are off. A new update can and will overwrite your configuration changes. While some data in /etc/ might not overwritten—assuming the package scripts were written by a courteous maintainer—changes in /usr/ will be toast.

Did you fix your OpenOffice.org icons to match the same Tango used in your OS rather than the poorly-matched Tango in synaptic? Tough cookies. Those are now gone. Hope you made a backup.

A greater problem is upgrades. Most Ubuntu users who have been around for a while know dist-upgrade is, at best, flaky. Allowing apt to move you up one distribution rarely plays out well. The resulting system lags. Shit does not work. Upgrades depend on new options not in your /etc/ configuration files and programs start crashing. More often than not, this fiasco ends in a wipe of the disk and a clean install. Oh well, at least you have your /home/.

But what about that great GlobalMenu you installed for Gtk? And how about all those customized panel plugins? What about the Orageclock you recompiled to prevent it from launching shit when you clicked on it since the programmers never considered such an option? Your /home/ files still expect all this to be in place, and none of it will be. These changes have been scattered throughout /usr/ hacking, and unless you kept extensive notes … well, don’t expect them to be reproducible.

All of this makes the reformat a particularly painful experience.

Is Windows different? Yes. For the most part, unless you are a Litestep user, you are limited in the customizations you can make. You can install a package to change the system icons. You can move around your menubars and the taskbar. You can add some icons to hide in the tray. But for the most part, Windows is just Windows, and aside from UI changes that are handled by a one-click installer or 5 minutes of tweaking, there’s not so much you can do with it.

There is a lot to be said for this. No one worries about reinstalling Windows. Finding the CDs to your big five applications may be annoying, as are their install processes, but there is rarely anxiety about your customizations being lost.

I think there is something to be said for this.

Lesson 2: There is no point to undervolting

Green people will tell your otherwise. They will also tell you that replacing Google with Blackle will help save several kilowatts of electricity every year. Undervolting may offer more real savings, but there is still no point. As voltage goes down, so does stability.

I have undervolted continuously since I got my Gateway laptop in 2005. It was one of the first Pentium Ms, and I was excited to see how RM-Clock could keep it running cooler. When I moved to Linux, the replacement for the old Rightmark utility was the PHC patch for the kernel. This patch is now and has always been a nightmare to compile. Most people, even when they can recompile a kernel, fail to get this patch to work. It does a poor job of keeping in step with kernel updates, and changes between Ubuntu versions often lead to a no-patch scenario where diff reports that the patch targes have changed too much.

Ubuntu users, myself included, did a lot to keep the patched binaries current. I released several of the patched binaries for PHC users, but from day one, there was a problem with PHC: stability. It was worse than RMClock’s. While RMClock allowed my PC to perform any task with no threat of crashing, the same machine would die running at 2GHz while playing a GameBoy Advance game in mednafen. For a while, I considered it a mednafen problem. Over time, especially after talking with the author, it became clear it was a PC problem—one most likely exposed via PHC.

I am not sure what the difference is between RMClock and PHC. Perhaps it also has something to do with my aging hardware. The fact remains that I experienced this problem.

Where Windows would sense the heat of the PC rising and scale back the CPU automatically to balance out, Linux burns ahead at full power until the CPU hits 90 degrees Celsius—BIOS lock. The solution is to manually scale it back with a small utility I wrote. The experience revealed a major issue with load-based CPU scaling: PHC never factors core heat into the equation.

For Linux defenders about to hurl the blame at me, let me note that I know how to undervolt. I beat my PC to death with prime calculators to locate the lock points. I even generously stepped up several levels from where it froze. That did not solve the hidden crashes which only came out during gaming.

This time, I have not installed PHC. I will still need to manually scale back my frequency for long compile times, but in daily use, the computer runs smoother and more reliably.

Lesson 3: There are no substitutes for professional software

I would truly enjoy strangling the next motherfucker who suggests that Scribus is a replacement for QuarkXpress or Adobe InDesign. The people who say this are simply parroting the words of Linux zealots—they are generally the same people that believe Linux is succeeding in China all because of several baseless Slashdot reports. There is no Linux in China. Red Flag Linux went nowhere. Loongson uses Debian. Every government office in the country works on Windows-powered machines. The Chinese Linux userbase is identical to the US Linux userbase: the geek crowd.

Back to Scribus.

Scribus, for those unfamiliar with the program, is a smalltime publishing application. It allows users to place text boxes and graphics and to arrange these elements on a page. Now, if you were to strip away everything else QuarkXpress and Adobe InDesign do, one could declare it a replacement.

By that logic, Microsoft Paint is an acceptable substitute for Adobe Photoshop because both programs edit graphics.

This comparison is hardly unfair. The difference between Paint and Photoshop is about the same as Scribus and any true publishing package. Scribus, were it to be compared to a professional suite, would be most in line with the old PrintMaster software by Broderbund or Microsoft Publisher. These are great programs if you need to bang out a greeting card, a poster or a flier for the local PTA meeting. These are not programs with which you design a book, a magazine or a newspaper.

The developers need to go back to Typography 101 and learn what designers care about and need to control, if the professional market is their real aim, because nothing needed is present. That is not to say you cannot make something nice in Scribus. You can. The program comes with several very pretty examples which actually look quite attractive—until you zoom in or print them. Print them, that is, from a Linux computer. As Scribus cannot export to PDF^** and Adobe has not produced a Distiller for Linux, there is no way to get designs from Scribus to any real printing house.

What design professionals need is not in place. You will not find tracking. You will not be able to make custom kern tables for your fonts. There are no ligatures. Hyphenation rules? Pshaw, who needs those? If these features are buried somewhere in the program, then they are too impractical to use during the time-limited environment of professional publishing.

The same can be said of most Linux software.

The Gimp is a great program. I have used it for years. It has most of the things I need for basic editing. It lacks the hotkeys that make Photoshop king. It’s not that the hotkeys are different—it’s that many actions do not even have a hotkey. At least a listed one. One of the most common motions in any project is the creation and merging or layers. None of the menus for these in The Gimp show a hotkey. Any hotkey. In Photoshop it would be CTRL+e. It would be fine if The Gimp simply had a different hotkey to learn. I accept that and expect the user must learn new things when using new software. What I cannot accept is that basic actions which must be performed dozens of times in every project require me to click through two menu levels—three, if you count bringing focus to the layers palette, which floats separately in The Gimp.

OpenOffice.org is fantastic software. The only thing it does not have that is used frequently—at least here in China—is the track changes feature. Otherwise, I have no complaints. I am sure someone who is more experienced in the Microsoft Office suite could point out more flaws, but my Microsoft Word use never extended beyond the casual word processing. If AbiWord would fix its smart quotes and dashes, even it could fit my needs.

Audio wise, Audacity is a powerful program—if you can get it to work. In many desktop environments, the default settings simply do not connect to the user’s audio server. Even on my system, which came with ALSA, selecting the ALSA option does not allow Audacity to play. It turns out that there is an issue with sample rates, and apparently the one Audacity specifies by default will not play out my ALSA.

This is on a clean install, mind you.

Trying to stop recording an continue recording on the same track is equally daunting, and Audacity can quickly crash your computer as it spawns track after track on false starts. It’s certainly not as friendly as Adobe Audition, formerly CoolEdit. It may be closer to SoundForge in terms of UI, but even that would be pushing it. It is a quality program, but could take a lesson in usability and compatibility—likely a consequence of its cross-platform nature.

Across the board, you will find these problems in Linux software. If you are considering making the move, do not listen to anyone who tells you Linux has equivalents for your favorite Windows programs. It does not and it cannot, and recent versions of anything rarely run in Wine. And really, if you are going to depend on Wine, why not just use Windows?

Lesson 4: do not install Wine or VirtualBox

I know, these are supposedly fantastic programs. VirtualBox is a work of art. The way it hooks into the kernel to execute everything natively instead of through emulation is brilliant, and it guarantees a machine that works beautifully even on low-end hardware.

Wine … not so much. But I’d prefer not to whine about that one’s performance (rimshot).

The key thing is that these programs waste your time and your disk space. Wine has a painful startup payload—as much as 38 seconds on my machine if Wine has not been run since a reboot. VirtualBox has the added pain of waiting for the Windows boot process, the Windows service lag and the inherent lag of loading the program on top of that. They also both require lots of ugly symlinking and sharing to intelligently access your normal Linux files outside their paths or virtual hard disks.

If you are in a position where you absolutely have to have that one Windows-only program for work, then buy a second computer just for work.

There is no reason to be cluttering your machine with things which will demand even more updates. VirtualBox updates slowly. The Ubuntu kernel updates quickly. Quite often, the kernel update will jump past VirtualBox, which will not have or be able to create matching compatible kernel modules. Suddenly, your solution just vanished unless you roll back a kernel, which will likely cause all manner of other problems on your disk.

There is another problem with Wine and VirtualBox—the hinder migration. They do not translate the UI into Gtk or Qt. The software looks like Windows. It runs like it is on a really crappy Windows. You are breaking the look of your existing desktop and avoiding having to learn a new program. I have always used hex editors. On Windows, I stuck by UltraEdit32 for years before moving to 010 Editor. These spoiled me and redefined what I expect a hex editor to be.

On Linux you have ghex—maybe bless if the Mono gods smile upon you. ghex is a filthy monster in that it kind of misses one of the key idea of hexadecimal: 16. While every other hex editor on the fucking planet—from old DOS ones to scripts in Vi and Emacs to Hex Workshop to Stanley—all base their interface on 16 columns. Even the Dreamcast VMU editor is 16 columns. ghex subscribes to the same UI aesthetic as widthless Web pages: however big the window gets, it just keeps writing bytes. This makes it an absolute hunk of shit. It is very hard to find and recognize arrays and data structures when shit is wrapping all over with no consistency. The saddest part is that while ghex has no maximum width, it does have a minimum one—and the minimum width is still larger than 16 columns!

But I adapted. For hacking around with some quick data bytes, it works great. If I want to bump up my EXP to get on with a game, ghex is just fine. Had I been emulating 010 Editor through Wine or VirtualBox, I probably would have spent three hours of my last two years waiting for those damn programs just to load for such small work.

I have simply learned to accept that I cannot do everything on one machine. I cannot have the solid stability and snappy speed of my Xfce desktop if I want access to QuarkXpress, Photoshop and my Nikon software. Is this a big deal? Not really. When it’s time to sit down and crunch layout or photos, I do not want IMs popping up and distracting me or those old video game emulators tempting me in the corner. When I am just at the desktop to kill time, read e-mail and have fun, then I usually don’t care about my access to professional software.

I think that separating work and play is a key component of using Linux on the desktop. Linux free (as in free beer or freedom) software is not going to match the quality of professional software: it doesn’t have the money required to keep that many people focused. Until it becomes a major player in the industrial desktop market, the companies who have already spent decades setting the industry standard will not invest in bringing their big programs to Linux. Just accept it.

If you treat your Linux desktop as the reliable place to handle basic tasks, enjoy games, chat, watch movies, and maybe do some small work on the side, then the software it has today is more than enough. Keep Windows or Mac for your actual workstation and equip them with just that—the software you need to work.

(^**: A user tracyanne has reported in the below discussion that PDF export is available. I have not tested and cannot confirm this. However, I would guess it is possible since RoseGarden has PDF export. RoseGarden’s works by printing to PostScript then automating a conversion [which sometimes fails] using ps2pdf.)

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