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

I Mattias Westlund wrote:

> I have my hands full already, tweaking little things that annoy me and 
> finding apps that suit my needs. But once I get everything set up like I 
> want it I might turn my attention to the GUI stuff. Right now it feels 
> like KDE is more than enough. One thing that keeps bothering me is that 
> fonts and font rendering in linux generally seems quite bad. I even had 
> to install some windows fonts just to make my eyes stop hurting. I'm on 
> an LCD now and I must say that ClearType is much superior to the linux 
> font smoothing -- IMHO.

There's definitely plenty of Tweaking to be done. I'm using the 
Gnome-based UI that comes standard with Ubuntu, and found that the Linux 
equivalent of Cleartype is turned "off" by default. Turning it back on 
with the Font preferences tool made things look much nicer. I'm not 
departing forever from Windows and LS, but I'll be spending more time in 
linux-land in the future, that's certain. Speaking of which, did anybody 
see the slashdot posting about the recently released MS internal emails? 
Particularly the one where Jim Allchin says (in an email to Ballmer and 
Gates) "I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft." Hah!

On another note, I first switched to LS as a full-time shell (rather 
than just an experiment) when a Windows SNAFU left me unable to run 
explorer as shell or file manager. I used LS and the "Find file" 
selection dialog that came with it at the time (from powerdesk perhaps?) 
to backup my personal files before I re-installed.

I had a similar experience tonight, having purchased an external hard 
drive to accommodate my daughter's rapidly growing music and video 
collection. I wanted to partition the new drive, so I fired up Partition 
Magic - only to see that it indicated "problems" with the new drive that 
it would neither identify nor repair. Windows chkdsk found nothing 
wrong,  and gave it a clean bill of health, but Windows doesn't offer 
any real partition management other than reformatting. So... I hooked 
the drive up to the laptop with Ubuntu installed, and used gparted to 
create the partitions, albeit in Fat32 (no NTFS support). I was then 
able to plug it back into the Windows machine and convert the partitions 
to NTFS. Way more trouble than it should have been, but in the end an 
open source app worked where the purchased proprietary app would not. 
Score another one for Team Linux. =)


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