My website has gone through quite a few iterations since its original conception back in the Fall of 2005. It was originally a C++ app I wrote from the ground up, listening on an open socket on my computer for people trying to connect via their browsers. It was a mess, but a really badass project and I learned a ton about network programming. If you have no idea what that means, this method for making a website is like cooking in which you have to build your own house, kitchen, and oven before you can even start making dinner.

I then eventually made a PHP and MySQL site, but again from scratch. I taught myself PHP and learned a lot about databases, but the site was basic, inflexible, and arduous to work on and update. The cooking metaphor? Making a cake from complete scratch, and doing a half-assed icing job. The most rewarding part was knowing you baked it yourself with your own recipe. It looks bad, but tastes pretty good. In the end your kitchen is a mess though, and you spent a lot of time working on it.

Finally, I gave up and installed Wordpress, an extremely popular CMS. I transferred over the majority of my blogs, but have yet to update it since. Extended metaphor aficionados could see this as making a boxed cake, and hiring a professional to do the icing job.

So I haven’t posted a blog in over a year, and I’m hoping to get back into it. Since I’ve installed Wordpress and seen how extremely flexible and easy to use it is, I have helped a few different friends set up their own websites, all powered by Wordpress. I don’t regret rolling my own site for so long, but the time has come to abandon the persuit for web development knowledge and jump on the all-in-one CMS bandwagon.

Hopefully soon, my blog will again but graced by the elegant unintelligible babble of my own obfuscated reflections on life. Something I’m sure that you, dear reader, are shitting yourself over in anticipation.

A few weeks ago, I thought I’d give Linux a legitimate try. Having spent a huge amount of time working with Linux machines both on campus and remotely, I felt I was pretty comfortable with the environment and the operating system overall. I was attracted to the power of the command line, the extraordinary modular design, the flexibility, the amazing file system design, and of course, the overall nerd factor. I started out with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), but eventually switched over to OpenSUSE 11.0.

So I setup a new partition on my system drive… and away I went.

The Fonts Look Like Ass

The very first thing I noticed when my computer booted to the Linux Gnome desktop is that the fonts look like booboo. At first I wasn’t very concerned, because it wasn’t until Vista that TrueType (a subpixel font rendering engine from Microsoft) was enabled by default. But even after messing with the settings and trying Linux’s version of subpixel font rendering, the results were still less that pleasing. Horrible gamma correction, shitty hinting options… etc.

The most common advice when trying to find a solution was to download Microsoft’s fonts (especially the new Vista fonts). Kind of ironic, huh? Even then, the fonts still looked like vomit to me. And what was worse, the overall font sizes had to be larger to remain clear, when on Windows I could lower the size and still maintain legibility. Everything in Gnome had to be bigger… effectively reducing my screen real estate.

Free Software Blows

There are exceptions, of course. Firefox, for example… is a great browser. But there are NO true alternatives to the Microsoft Office Suite, the Adobe Creative Suite, or Microsoft Visual Studio.

The Gimp (the shitty GNU image editor/Photoshop replacement) is under featured, buggy, and slower than Photoshop. I tried to give this app a chance, but it’s pretty horrible. OpenOffice looks and feels like Office 95 or worse, and is less stable than Office 2007 SP1. It’s also slower to open, with a lot of rendering bugs from my existing documents.

And there is NOTHING comparable to the ease of use of Outlook 2007. I use it to seamlessly check my email from my UT account and my Gmail, as well as synchronize my calendar and contacts via Bluetooth with my phone, and keep up-to-date on my friends via their shared Outlook calendars. Nothing on Linux can do that… without a horribly complex and counter-intuitive process that half-assedly works half the time (25% efficiency?).

None of the billions of music apps that are out there even remotely compare to the stability, speed, and aesthetic appeal of Winamp or iTunes either… so hopefully you don’t like listening to music much.

Of course, there was nothing even remotely as powerful as the SONAR 8 + FL Studio 8 combo I have running under Vista. With Vista, my latencey for my outboard sound hardware was about 5.9ms, with Linux (and lmms), it was around 320ms.

And I don’t care what everyone else says, VIm is not a replacement for Visual Studio.

You can’t really blame them… of course a nerd-run project that is in perpetual beta is not going to hold a candle to the products of multi-billion dollar companies like Microsft, Apple, and Adobe… but the Linux fans need to stop acting like this isn’t the case.

Anyway…

Technically, Linux is a great operating system. This website is actually run on a Linux server and is extremely reliable… but I think that’s as far as it goes. Sure it’s fun to geek around with compiling all your own shit and what not, but most people (even most geeks) will just want an OS that works out of the box.

Linux is NOT a consumer-level desktop OS for a power user, home audio enthusiast, productivity geek, digital artists, film producer, songwriter/music producer, or most average people.

Maybe for old granny, who doesn’t need to do anything but check her email and look up cross-stitching patterns on the internet, Linux is good because you don’t have to buy the Microsoft products. But… what if she needs to print something? Good luck getting the drivers to work.

Or maybe old granny knows how to download custom drivers and compile them herself?