(Fri, Mar 10, 2006)
Philip Seymour Hoffman, when I remember that he exists, is one of my favorite actors. State and Main, Almost Famous, Magnolia, Owning Mahowny. Shut up, this guy's great.
(Sun, Mar 26, 2006)
Ever since Dr. Jones began crafting those delightful little Windows viruses -- and us without access to critical security patches on our defacto island -- I was left with little choice: either switch to Linux or kill Dr. Jones once and for all. I confess to taking the easier route. The doctor can be a formidable adversary (especially with his scary new shorted fuel cell muscles).
So I've been running SuSE 10.0 for the past several months. And I've had to change everything, most of the apps I once used every day and threatened to punish my neighbors for avoiding. Or rather most of them. Firefox is still here, although slightly different from the Windows version. And I have Agent running under Wine (for which I am extremely grateful). I've been using XMMS and amaroK for music -- I can't decide which I dislike least; neither is as good as Quintissential. Similarly, MPlayer is not as good as Zoom Player, but mostly good enough. Kate, KWrite, Gedit, etc are not as good as EmEditor, but mostly good enough. Same for OpenOffice. Filesharing with Windows machines isn't a problem because I've had a NAS drive for a while now (it's basically an external hard drive plugged into the LAN and running Samba).
It seems like when you're running Linux you spend most of your time configuring Linux. Or learning how to configure it. It's always almost right, but there's also always something that's not quite right, or one more bit of Windows functionality that you took for granted that you still need to try to duplicate somehow. Like those special mouse buttons the Logitech Windows driver lets me configure. There's a way to get those working on Linux, but it will probably take hours to accomplish. Or a dual monitor setup. This was the first big hurdle I had to leap before I was willing to give Linux a serious try as a desktop OS. I couldn't possibly live with just one monitor. And it's the reason I landed on SuSE. I couldn't get it to work on Ubuntu or CentOS/Red Hat (although I probably could now). And I still haven't gotten Xinerama to work; I've got two seperate desktops rather than one big one. But it's mostly good enough.
So I've been running SuSE 10.0 for the past several months. And I've had to change everything, most of the apps I once used every day and threatened to punish my neighbors for avoiding. Or rather most of them. Firefox is still here, although slightly different from the Windows version. And I have Agent running under Wine (for which I am extremely grateful). I've been using XMMS and amaroK for music -- I can't decide which I dislike least; neither is as good as Quintissential. Similarly, MPlayer is not as good as Zoom Player, but mostly good enough. Kate, KWrite, Gedit, etc are not as good as EmEditor, but mostly good enough. Same for OpenOffice. Filesharing with Windows machines isn't a problem because I've had a NAS drive for a while now (it's basically an external hard drive plugged into the LAN and running Samba).
It seems like when you're running Linux you spend most of your time configuring Linux. Or learning how to configure it. It's always almost right, but there's also always something that's not quite right, or one more bit of Windows functionality that you took for granted that you still need to try to duplicate somehow. Like those special mouse buttons the Logitech Windows driver lets me configure. There's a way to get those working on Linux, but it will probably take hours to accomplish. Or a dual monitor setup. This was the first big hurdle I had to leap before I was willing to give Linux a serious try as a desktop OS. I couldn't possibly live with just one monitor. And it's the reason I landed on SuSE. I couldn't get it to work on Ubuntu or CentOS/Red Hat (although I probably could now). And I still haven't gotten Xinerama to work; I've got two seperate desktops rather than one big one. But it's mostly good enough.