linux: cancel, retry or ignore?
I’ve dipped my toe in the linux waters several times over the years. The closest I came to actually switching was a couple of years ago when Ubuntu 5.04 (aka Hoary Hedgehog) hit the streets. This was the first Linux distribution I had tried where everything “just worked” and I managed to run it as my primary operating system at home for several months. However, in the end it didn’t give me anything I couldn’t get in Windows, and I was still heavily reliant on a couple of Windows-only apps.
Two years later I am willing to give it another go. Ubuntu still seems to be the best choice and the latest version (7.04 - aka Feisty Fawn) seems to be a huge improvement on what was already a very good Linux distro. This time I have decided not to go the dual-boot path and am running Linux as the only OS on my desktop system at home (though I still have XP on the laptop).
One of the hurdles I will have to clear is getting Noise Ninja running under Linux. My first attempt will be to try it under wine. If that doesn’t work I’ll see how I go running it in VMWare, but my feeling is that if you have to go to those lengths then it’s getting to be more trouble that it’s worth. Other photo-related challenges are RAW conversion and geo-tagging.
OpenOffice is better these days than last time I tried it, but it is still dreadfully sucky. However, I have found a cheap alternative in SoftMaker Office that so far seems pretty good. It handles complex Excel spreadsheets with aplomb where OpenOffice’s Calc will grind away for 10-15 seconds every time you change a cell. It’s Word processor doesn’t seem quite as compatible as I would like, but I think it’s good enough for my purposes.