Re: Flight from Twisted Vista (was Re: Ok. Heh, is there still...)

Noooooo, did we loose yet another to Linux? :(

Personally I can't stand KDE or anything that stats with K.

Mattias Westlund wrote:
> After all this Linux vs Windows talk here lately I went ahead and 
> installed openSUSE on my machine. It's a dual boot though, I still 
> have XP installed, but I've spent the most part of the latest two days 
> in Linux. And I must say that I like it, I could very well imagine 
> becoming a full-time Linux user eventually. Sure, there's a lot of 
> stuff you have to learn and re-learn, but it doesn't feel quite as 
> hopless as when I've played around with Linux in the past. Maybe it's 
> because openSUSE is a distro that suits me, or maybe it's just that 
> I'm so sick of Windows ATM that I welcome the change.
>
> So far almost everything is working smoothly -- I've managed to get 
> Photoshop 7 running under Wine and it seems to work pretty good. Looks 
> awful though, with that Win 95 color scheme, but maybe that can be 
> changed somehow (the msstyles support in Wine seems more than a little 
> flaky). I've installed UT 2004 and Jedi Academy and I was surprised to 
> find that game performance in Linux is frigging excellent. I actually 
> get better performance in UT2004 under Linux than I get with UT99 in 
> Windows; my framerate is soaring even though everything's on max and I 
> have AA and Anisotropy set pretty high :) So that was a pleasant 
> surprise.
>
> As for Cubase SX, I fear that there's no chance I'll be able to use 
> it. It might /run/ under Wine, but from what I've gathered it's not 
> going to be very useful as Wine lacks the advanced audio support 
> Cubase requires. It won't let the app communicate directly with the 
> hardware, and thus you'll get very high audio latencies. So even if I 
> decide jo jump in and migrate to Linux I will have to keep a windows 
> installation around for music making and gaming. Which maybe isn't a 
> bad idea after all; that way I could really optimize and streamline 
> the Windows install for those tasks and those tasks only.
>
> There's a number of small things that bother me about Linux though and 
> I have hundreds of questions to ask. But maybe this is not the place. 
> However, one thing that (oddly enough) does *not* bother me much is 
> the UI/custo bit. At this point at least I feel that KDE has pretty 
> much everything I need in terms of interface looks and functionality 
> and I really don't miss LS much. So even if LS was ported to Linux, I 
> really don't see myself using it as KDE is good enough for me and lets 
> me set everything up without touching a single config file.
>
> So... thanks everyone. This discussion finally made me install Linux. 
> Now I'm gonna go figure out how the heck to import my Thunderbird 
> profile so I don't have to reboot into Windows to check and send 
> emails :)
>
> /West
>
>
> tin_omen wrote:
>> This thread seems to have taken on an undead life of it's own. Time 
>> to change my original subject to something more accurate...
>>
>> Funny how timely a subject this is, as it's what I've been kicking 
>> around for the last few months, as well. Heck a group of us were 
>> standing around discussing exactly this subject in our messaging IT 
>> group just last week.
>>
>> Like quite a few people in here, I make a living supporting M$ 
>> infrastructure (last 12yrs+). It's the demon I know, and I've made a 
>> decent living doing it. But having said that, I've got zero interest 
>> in shifting any of the five XP machines we have at home to Vista 
>> (wife & I's Dell laptops, an HP video/podcast/torrent DL box, an old 
>> P3-650 Micron that does low & slow vid-compression, and our 
>> SageTV-based hometheather box).
>>
>> -I don't like the DRM/HDCP/AACS or paying a vendor that's repeatedly 
>> demonstrated they aim to serve 3rd-parties interests over me, the 
>> paying customer. I built a SageTV htpc a yr ago to replace my 
>> lifetime-subscr TiVo (once it dies) for the same reasons. Gotta love 
>> the potential for vista "killing" an entire range of hardware that 
>> becomes "suspect" simply to suit the insecurities of the HD-DVD folk.
>>
>> -I don't like the new licensing limited lifespan (Per M$ only RETAIL 
>> copies of Vista are transferable to your next home-built computer, 
>> and then, only _ONCE_. Prepare to weedle M$ for new keys, down the road)
>>
>> -For Gaming: I've got an Xbox360 & PS/2 that I play games on these 
>> days (and a Gamefly sub to keep them stocked) -- haven't run a game 
>> on my main box since I last fired up VTM:bloodlines a year or so ago. 
>> Without the need to continuously upgrade my hardware to play new game 
>> releases, and no need to try to "buy" better multiplayer performance 
>> against other players by buying more hardware (360 is a pretty 
>> "level" playing field), a big part of my last ten years of upgrade 
>> rat race are now gone. "Improved" Gaming OS support was the only 
>> reason I upgraded from 98se to XP when I finally made that change -- 
>> well after most folks, as I recall.:D
>>
>> -HDTV: I don't own an HDTV -- 99% of my tv viewing is sourced on an 
>> old sdtv Tivo. And I have no interest in watching HD on my pc or 
>> laptop. Not to mention with vista's DRM, I _really_ would have 
>> reasons not to. I do enough quick DVD viewing, while 
>> authoring/ripping discs that I know it's a pain in the ass to watch a 
>> movie at the range of a couple of feet.
>>
>> -Media-support: I'll NEVER run MCE for any home theater -- my brother 
>> does, but he has lower expectations and does substantially less with 
>> the box.:D SageTV (which is available for Linux) outputs all of it's 
>> recordings in friendly non-drm avi format. Ready to 
>> burn/archive/remix, whatever. Heck even my Squeezebox mp3-headunit 
>> can run it's backend just dandy under linux! And it offloads the 
>> mem-footprint onto a background server, where it won't impact TV 
>> recording.
>>
>> So, I'm actually at the point now that our next home desktop OS after 
>> XP will not be on a M$ platform. There's alot of technical folks I 
>> respect that run Linux/*nix servers and Mac desktops, and Linux has 
>> always been a possibility, not to mention it doesn't require 
>> replacing any hardware or buying all new software.
>>
>> The meat and potatoes of my daily computer use can be done with any 
>> OS (firefox, tbird, & sub in OpenOfc for excel & word). So, which 
>> apps really 'tie' me to XP: Photoshop, and some convenience tools 
>> that would be nice to have on-hand.
>>
>> And that's where virtualization comes in: Due to cisco-vpn 
>> restrictions in my firm's client, several months ago I started 
>> running all of my work vpn-access out of a canned little xp vmware 
>> session on my xp box's desktop. It does everything I need, is 
>> low-overhead, and lets cisco's little fascist config believe that the 
>> rest of the world is 'locked out', while I'm accessing work... while 
>> I continue to surf the web and my home-life goes blissfully on in the 
>> background.
>>
>>  From there, I had no choice but to pull down a free copy of vmware 
>> server and install it on one of my servers (which had little else to 
>> do, since it's primary role was as a redundant domain controller, dns 
>> & backup server). So I stocked it with a whole suite of vmware images 
>> of a variety of os's and apps for testing/evaluating/playing-with: 
>> Exchange2007beta, SQL2k5, Mom2k5, a variety of Unices, some odd 
>> Linuxes. Beos. Pretty much anything: if it's not installed yet, I've 
>> probably dug around on the docs and grabbed the necessary isos.:P I 
>> added the vmware server client on my xp box, and that little vpn-xp 
>> vm happily hopped it's load over to the server.
>>
>> Of course, the nifty thing about all this is that I can run vmware 
>> just as well under Linux! Next step is probably going to be 
>> converting the above server to an Ubuntu box.
>>
>> Extending this vm-use, have you guys seen the write-up at 
>> Lifehacker... 
>> (http://lifehacker.com/software/linux/run-windows-apps-on-your-linux-desktop-229832.php), 
>>
>> ... pointing to an article on 2X ApplicationServer for Win Termserv?
>> (http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid39_gci1238129,00.html) 
>>
>> (http://www.2x.com/applicationserver/)
>>
>> 2XAS has a free download with a perpetual license for a 5-connection 
>> version. This app essentially delivers 'citrix-like' publishing of 
>> apps from out of a background vm right onto your linux desktop, with 
>> the vm-apps appearing as individual app windows. It delivers windows 
>> apps seamlessly into linux! I haven't tried it out yet, but I'm 
>> definitely going to.
>>
>> Beyond the above, for folks hung on Photoshop, there are quite a few 
>> write-ups on getting ps running under Linux with Wine. One I stumbled 
>> across recently was:
>> http://lifehacker.com/software/photoshop/how-to-install-photoshop-on-ubuntu-206827.php 
>>
>>
>> And hey, who runs a linux install with the default interfaces in this 
>> community? We're about tweaking things out! Heh, the first time I 
>> installed slackware, a good 10 years ago, it was to be able to try 
>> out Windowmaker & Enlightenment!:D It's really not that difficult to 
>> tweak out a given distro's interface. As usual. Google is your friend.:D
>>
>> Todd
>> tin_omen
>>
>> todd kadrie  |  tin_omen-gfZTEr3/[email protected] |  desktopian.org
>
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