tried ubuntu for a week - back to mac
okay, i am officially back on mac.
for those of you following along, you will know that i have spent the last few days once again trying to make a go using linux on a laptop. there are a few reasons why i have decided to ditch this idea. sure, i did my time and figured each of these out, but there were some HUGE annoyances that i didn’t want to spend any more time dealing with.
they are as follows:
printing - we use a ricoh networked printer here at work. my mac saw it, and just started using it without any problems. ubuntu couldn’t find the right drivers, and after awhile, just flat out gave up. i am sure i could deal with this if i threw more time at it.. but well.. time IS money.. and screw that..
sound - thanks to a few great websites, i recompiled alsa, and got my sound working correctly, but there were still a few things that were major annoyances. when you put headphones in, it was a crap shoot that the laptop speakers were gonna turn off when i wanted them to. fiddling with the volume was a HUGE pain.
no quicksilver - okay, this is something that is kinda wussy, but i have grown to rely on quicksilver. i cannot do without it. period. i refuse. i know this is not a real OS thing, but this is a tool that helps me get stuff done quickly, without thinking much about it… and breaking my train of thought.
no textmate - i absolutely love emacs. for lots of things. but there are things that textmate just does WAY better. rails development, blogging, and quick edits here and there. there is just no match for textmate when you need to get shiz done quickly and easily.
display - at work, i run a big display. when i get to work with my powerbook, i just plug it into the big display, and whatever i was doing snaps right back to life on the new machine. no problem. with ubuntu, i had to reconfigure X a few different times to get the correct resolutions to work. not that it was horrible, but there is no possible way that a newbie could do this without sharting himself. when i got it running, the screens ran in mirror mode. getting them to switch was a nightmare. i also had to restart X every time i needed to attach the new screen. it was easier to just reboot.
ipod - i was TOTALLY shocked out how great the ipod support was. it could play all the files, but i couldn’t get it to give me a random playlist while excluding podcasts. that was kind of a deal breaker in that i listen to TONS of podcasts and TONS of random playlists.
other display issue - this is no slight on ubuntu at all, but my display on my powerbook rocks. the display on my lenovo sucks. i can’t stand looking at it any longer. it does look okayish in ubuntu, but when you plug in a real screen, you can really tell how lacking it is.
The automator - yeah, all of us real programmers know that the automator is gay. it’s not programming. but for programmers, we get paid to get stuff done, not just to write code. the automator has saved me HOURS millions of times. enough to make it worthwhile.
Simplify Media - for those of you who run itunes and like to share playlists, this allows you to share them across the internet. i just discovered this a few weeks ago, and was having major withdrawals.
Hibernate - no matter what i did, it was a crap shoot as to what was gonna happen when i shut the book. with the powerbook, it just quietly goes to sleep, and when i open it up, it wakes up. with ubuntu, it would either wake up correctly, or the battery would be dead. i messed with it for awhile, and it seemed to work, but i was never SURE that it would open up where i left off. the whole week i used ubuntu, my powerbook was shut off in my purse. this morning, when i officially came back, i hooked up the power (battery was dead) and it sprung back right where i left off.
All that being said, there are a some things that i LOVE about ubuntu. i will keep it on this laptop (and probably upgrade to ubuntu studio via some scripts a guy posted). i have not used linux as my sole OS for a year or so (i do this alot) but i was impressed at all the new stuff:
wireless networking - laptops are tricky, but there was a ton of info on how to get my wifi working. it took about ten minutes, and it worked great.
sound - sound was always a big pain. not anymore. even running a laptop, i had no problems. i had to recompile alsa, but that wasn’t horrible.
music programs - there are a ton of great players now, even native last.fm players that ran without a hitch.
browser issues - this was always the deal killer for me. i could never get two things i always use to run consistently: rhapsody and sirius. rhapsody ran fine (although i had to google a bit to get it to work), but sirius was still a no go. there is a program called sipie that lets you play sirius through a neat little interface, but i think the source may be based on an older version of the sirius website, and it’s broken.
emacs - since emacs is so embedded into linux so deeply, i ended up using it really heavily and learning a bunch more about it.
Support - at this point, any problem you run into has been solved a hundred times and is one or two gooles away.
multimedia - plays dvds, sound files, and runs like a full on jukebox with no glitches, hiccups, or delays like the old days.
anyway, i am keeping ubuntu on this machine, but i am not going to be using it as my main work machine. it will be a music production (hobby, not pro) machine.