Linux

Here we are having the most amazing ramen at our favorite ramen place Oozakura! Emma's happy even though she can't have ramen.That's her Halloween outfit she has on too. She loves her Mummy! I've been just flat out exhausted this week and not gotten up the energy to blog in a while, but today I'm feeling a little better.


Today's post is going to be a quick tech blog comparing Windows and Linux. I've been playing with Windows 8 for the past couple of months, and while I hated being on Windows, it did work, though not well. I've now switched back to Linux Mint 13 with the cinnamon interface and I have to say, it's nice. So many things I missed out on!!
Let's start with the interface -- the "Metro" interface is a nightmare to use on a desktop. It will work great on tablets, but on a desktop, I don't want to have to hunt down and find the icon I want in pages after pages of tiles:

It looks nice and colorful, but... a little difficult to use. Also I get confused between Windows programs and apps from the Windows app store.. they behave differently, programs open in a window and apps go full screen. The built in PDF reader was especially bad. Let's see what mint looks like:

Looks familiar right? I thought so.
Let's continue.. What do I have out of the box? Full office support, I have Thunderbird (my favorite email), Firefox, VLC media player, Banshee music player (I prefer rhythmbox) and pidgin IM. What does Windows have? All of their windows apps for  these which require you to have a app store account etc etc... and no Office, that's a separate purchase. I mentioned PDF reader above, Mint comes with documentviewer which reads not just PDF but almost every text file I've met.

My notes:
My system is a beast, I have 32gb ram and a good 2.5GB of video cards. On Windows, it wants to set aside 32gb on my hard disk for paging but the hard disk only has 120gb total space!! On Linux, obviously, you can set your own space fairly easily, and it doesn't have to be on the same disk.

I have 3 monitors, and I found that if I was streaming netflix or xbmc on the TV and did something fullscreen on another one, on windows the playback would stop whereas on Linux it continues without a care in the world.

I have a DLNA media server in my living room which I use to stream to my other devices, in Linux, not only can I browse it via DLNA (Windows could do it too) but I can actually mount it like a local drive and load the files into a playlist. (Windows couldn't do that)

Finally, I was also experimenting with Office 365 consumer preview. It was actually nice, and I preferred it to Libre office (it has more "polish") but the ribbon drives me crazy!!

So, in summary, use Linux! It's free, as in beer! And it works really well... at least for me. So many things just .. work, or work better.

See you space cowboys!