Well, with Kpilot installed and my Palm data fully synced to the desktop under Ubuntu, “Easy Ubuntu” pulling a buncha media codecs and apps off the web and installing them (so video, mp3, etc., all just work seamlessly), the latest Linux GUI box is looking more and more like nearly a full replacement for any Windows box in the stable here at twc central.
(Of course, there’s still the lack of decent music transcription available for Linux. No, let’s not get all steamed about the “great” music transcription apps for Linux, cos they aren’t. Really. Great looking scores, I’ll admit, but crappy interfaces. I want to sit at a midi keyboard and just play the stuff in. And there’s no Linux music transcription software yet that does that as well as what I already have on a Windows box. And no, running my fav transcription software under WINE doesn’t work. Yet.*)
Everything else I do–or that even any average computer user might do–is doable with a slick Linux GUI, now. (And free office apps? Oh, yeh. Works for this tightwad.)
But it’s still not “Aunt Tilly ready” cos it takes downloading and installing tons of extras from more than a few different repositories, learning some command line syntax (gotta love “sudo”–cute trick to teach old DOS dogs) and a few other things in order to get a Linux GUI box to the point where it’s as slick as–well, slicker than, really–a Windows box right, urm, outa the box.
But if you like to tinker, you can certainly build a nice Linux box using Ubuntu or Puppy Linux or Xandros or one of the other nicely-done GUI-based distros for a newbie user, be it “Aunt Tilly” or your elderly parents or whomever, much less expensively than buying a piece of crap $400 Dell or HP that’ll be a doorstop in no time flat. And when they call tech support (you), at least they’ll be able to understand the language you speak. I hope.
Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, and Planck’s Constant, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
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*Rosegarden and a couple of others bid fair to become adequate replacements for Gvox’s (formerly Passport Designs’) Encore, which I much prefer to Finale, both for the look of final scores and for ease of musical writing of scores. Sibelius, another popular Windows/Mac transcription software currently outputs scores about as nicely as the available Linux software offerings, which is to say, not worth my time using… and that (very much driven by personal taste) comparison is all I need to relegate Linux-based transcription software to the “not yet” category.
Encore in Linux using WINE? *sigh* Not yet. Not even older versions, of which I have every one from ver. 4.5 back to Encore 2.1. *profound sigh* Of course *grr* the older versions wouldn’t even open most of my scores written in later versions, anyway, so editing would be crappy, even if they would run in WINE. And writing new scores in older versions—even if they would run using WINE—would be clunky, though at least they’d look better than scores written with the other softwares.
So, a couple of Windows machines will still be up n running here at twc for some time to come, it seems. One Win98 running Encore 4.2, an older but still capable version of PowerTracks Pro and a couple of other apps, and a Win2000 Pro machine running Encore 4.5 (that’s developed a font-related issue with lyric input in recent weeks… need to reinstall some core fonts that seem to have been corrupted, but the shoemaker’s shoes are always the last *heh* to be repaired) and a couple of other apps I like (like PG Music’s Classical Pianist, which I don’t think PG Music even sells any more).