Is Linux Ready For The Desktop?

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Larry Hamilton seems to share my opinion of the state of Linux right at the moment. I regard myself as something of a power user, I have no formal education at all but I can usually find and configure a solution on Windows to do whatever tak is at hand most efficiently. Over the three years that I have been on the Internet, I have honed my program list down to three daily use biggies: Firefox with all the plugins that allow me to leap tall buildings with a single click, PocoMail for retriving, sorting, some really amazing sending options, and NoteTab Pro for everything and I do mean everything else. Oh and I will upon occasion crack open Photoshop.

As a break from my day to day efficiency as web super star, on Tuesday nights I become Scout Mom with a laptop, and hit the coffee shops with my wireless card. I use Linux without fail on these fun nights out, and everything goes without a hitch even down to the occasional use of FTP to take advantage of faster connection speeds.

The trick will be to make the switch to Linux at home in my ‘work environment’.

I have found two Linux distros that will potentially work on my desktop. I am handicapped when compared to over half of all Americans because I am unwilling to invest in a broadband connection. I did spring for a serial (external) modem which in theory will allow a Linux box to connect to the Internet. I have had good luck with both Ubuntu which is installed on my desktop and Puppy, which is a pseudo-live CD. By the way, I have had no trouble with either of these distros when I tried to use my printer. Maybe I just have good taste in printers.

Now all I need is to get an efficient software roster so I can get to work. Ubuntu comes with Firefox out of the box so all I need is to spend a day or three aquiring all the extensions that make my life worthwhile. Hopefully I can import my bookmarks from Windows. The Puppy distro comes with it’s own unique system of installing programs. Perhaps Firefox is something they have already configured. The Puppy guys have done a great amount of work on their distro and the casual user could do worse than to give their effort a serious spin. It will work for me only as far as their particular focus coincides with my needs. As an aside, I have installed programs sucessfully on my laptop under Mandrake, Opera browser went painlessly well, but I could only figger out how to install Firefox in my temp folder, something to do with permissions. Sure don’t want to spend any time configuring that.

As far as the e-mail goes, I could work something out or boot into Windows once a week or so to keep things going, the possibilities are great.

Now on to my right hand, I have communicated with Larry and he has assured me that NoteTab will run under WINE. Now I am pretty sure that Wine Is Not an Emulator but otherwise I am clueless. Do you think I have that? Does it have to be turned on somewhere? Now my biggest complaint with Ubuntu so far is that it does not see my Win partition so I have to experiment elsewhere. My Knoppix disk is fairly old so I tried SBIE, Slax, and the aforementioned Puppy. I saw no reference to WINE, or even K-wine or X-WINE or anything lke that. I tried clicking on a Windows program with no joy. Seems to me I need to either figure out how to mount windows under Ubuntu or maybe install WINE in Puppy multisession or even try something else like Mandriva or Kubuntu. This will have to be resolved before I even think of moving my 34 (count em) e-mail addresses into Evolution or K-something or perhaps Thunderbird.

I have not even touched on the other thing, local webservers. My websites run on Linux and I know it is goodness, but what do you have to do to run it locally? Compile PHP? I want to do it, I just don’t know how. With Windows it is only a download, someone has done all the work.

The times, they are a changing, and I want to be in on it. In a couple of years, we will look back an wonder why this was even an issue.