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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Continue reading “A wee tad closer to an all-Linux twc”
