Things I did this week using Ubuntu Hardy 8.04:

  • Burned an Audio CD using Brasero
  • Resized pictures using Gimp
  • Organized my music using Rhythmbox
  • Talked to my friends online using Pigeon
  • Worked from home using network-manager-vpnc
  • Watched Youtube videos using Firefox
  • Bought music online using Amazon MP3 downloader

I did all of that, without ever opening any consoles or terminals. My girlfriend had a similar workflow on her Dell laptop. I am sick of all these people who say ‘well application X’ doesn’t work on Linux. The bottom line is, for 99% of the population, gimp is just as good as photoshop. Sorry, your digital art skills never demanded the capabilities of photoshop based on most of the content I see on the internet. Buttons may be in different places than you expected, learn things, find them and do it. Trivial prior knowledge of button locations is not an asset, but a mental deficiency, when every menu has labels.

“Oh but I manage all my money in Quicken” – Again, from a United States specific view, no, you probably just like to complain. If American’s were managing their money, maybe the foreclosure rates wouldn’t be so high, credit card debt would be much lower, and everyone wouldn’t be crying about gas prices and it’s impact on the economy. So, in fact, if you are using Windows, and not using Quicken, start using it. Atleast fix that part of your life. Save your money and raise the value of my dollar.

“All of my email is in outlook/groupwise/whatever” – Export it.

“Microsoft Office is what I am used to and edits better than OpenOffice” – First off, I will go back to my point: learn things. Second, why is it everyone says how great office is, but unless their work bought it, has anyone actually has paid for it? If it was free, thats a strong argument. But it isn’t, and you are probably a pirate (yes having the kid down the street install some copy he has is still piracy).

“There is no equivalent of Microsoft Visual Studio!” – Right because there are just a ton of good projects even developed with that. If that was the case, why is it that Windows administrators constantly reboot their boxes and can almost never find the cause of problems? Unfortunately due to restrictions I can’t cite specifics, but in big business this happens almost always. Closed source little companies can *definitely* not provide enterprise level support, no matter how big of contract they sell you. For that matter, how about since 1996 or so the world has changed. Your applications should be web based and the backend should run on Linux. If you are making a fat client for anything remotely resembling: trivial dialogs, input which will be uploaded anyway, or anything that does not computationally require the client extensively, quit making software. I see ton’s of software that is just some glorified html input form but you felt the need to do it in Visual Studio, package it up, and do it piss poor.

“My graphics never work in Linux!” – Take that money you *supposedly* spend on those cool windows apps you use, and buy a real video card. I have IBM, Dell, HP, eMachines and custom built machines (over 5000) running graphical interfaces under linux. Without me tweaking each Xorg.conf.

“What about games?” – You got me there. That answer is neither learn things, nor play outside. Wish I had something else to say.

That’s all.

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