Another shot at Linux

Every now and again I take the time to install a Linux distro on an extra machine I have laying around. Or lying around. I always get that mixed up.

Anyway, this time it was a 933-MHz machine I got from a friend. It had [shiver] Windows ME on it, which meant that it was getting a new OS no matter what.

After a bit of re-research, I decided once again to go with a Ubuntu-based distro. (For those of you who don’t know, Ubuntu is one of the most popular versions or "distros" of Linux, in large part because it’s both easy to use and very good looking. And yes, I’ve had dates like that.)

I prefer Kubuntu to Ubuntu; behind the scenes they’re the same, but Kubuntu uses the KDE desktop environment (i.e., the look and feel), which I like better than the Gnome environment that Ubuntu uses.

This time, though, I went with Xubuntu, which is designed to work well on older, slower systems. The machine it was going on isn’t that slow, but I liked the idea of a zippy machine, and I like Xubuntu’s Xfce environment.

So I downloaded and installed it with barely a hitch. (The only problem came from the hardware tweaking I had done. The OS itself was just fine.)

Last time I tried Linux at length,which I wrote about in my USA Today column, I found a bunch of rough edges. Some of them are gone, but many remain. This time, though, I went into it with the mindset more of someone who was going to use it himself, as opposed to evaluating it for a novice user. In other words, if I had to jump through a few hoops to get things the way I wanted them, that was OK.

Rough edges

Say what you want about Microsoft, but some of the handholding is nice to have. For example, when Xubuntu wanted to know how I wanted it to use the hard drive space, it gave me choices something like "Resize IDE1 master (hda1)."

What it should have done is say, "I detect a 120-GB hard drive that already contains 42GB of files. How would you like me to set up that drive for Xubuntu?

A) Use all the free space for Xubuntu
B) Erase the disk and use the whole thing for Xubuntu
C) Use a portion of the current free space for Xubuntu [advanced]?

Until the [X/K]ubuntu developers start thinking like that, it’s not going to be ready for the teeming millions.

Anyway, I said I wasn’t going to think too much like a novice, so the partitioning choices weren’t a big deal. I wiped the drive and installed. Then I spent some time tweaking things to my liking. Eventually all was well, and it was working smoothly.

And then those rough edges and annoyances appeared.

I’ve already mentioned that one of Linux’s strengths is also a weakness: too much choice. Imagine if your Windows machine came with four different text editors and three calculators. Luckily, this version of Xubuntu (Feisty Fawn) is significantly leaner. Yes, there were two word processors (AbiWord and OpenOffice’s Writer), but for the most part it wasn’t that annoying.

Some annoyances remain. Tweaking the general appearance — color scheme, menu bar behavior, display settings — means going to three or four different control panels instead of a single "Appearance" or "Display Properties." Very frustrating trying to keep that straight.

Xubuntu — and all the distros I’ve used — come with a gadzillion fonts. I supposed that’s all right, but many, many of them are strikingly similar to one another. There are, simply, too many fonts and not enough variation. (You have to install the basic Windows fonts yourself. That’s important because so many Web sites use Times New Roman, Arial, Georgia, and Verdana.)

In Windows, your fonts are in your /Windows/fonts directory. In Linux they’re in /usr/shared/fonts/truetype — something you wouldn’t even guess. I discovered it via a Google search and cleaned out a ton of useless typefaces, including what seemed like dozens of non-Latin-character sets.

Missing pieces

Linux also suffers from a dearth of truly high-quality, polished applications. Yes, The GIMP is a darned good image editor, but it’s not up to Photoshop level; it’s like store-brand ketchup compared to Heinz — decent, unless you’ve already used the good stuff. Ditto for OpenOffice, which has improved some since last I tried it, but still isn’t nearly as finished as Word.

Most annoyingly, there is simply no good video editor for Linux. I dabble in that enough that I couldn’t switch to Xubuntu full time.

Even if I could, there’s another missing piece: a blog client. There are no blog tools for Linux even close to the sophistication of Windows Live Writer, which sets the standard (and is free). Linux blog tools are fine unless you want to include images in your posts, in which case the procedure is clunky at best. WLW lets you drag and drop pictures from your hard drive into a post and handles uploading and positioning for you.

There are some wonderful Linux apps, to be sure, and my two workhorses — Firefox and Thunderbird — are both available. But even installing them isn’t straightforward. Do you download a .deb or .rpm file when given the choice? And even when you pick the right one you might have to navigate some cryptic screens. (Last time I spend hours dealing with "dependencies" for a video editor I wanted before finally giving up the ghost. Linux needs an equivalent of "setup.exe.")

For e-mail, Web browsing, light image editing, and most basic tasks, Linux remains an excellent choice. But as a replacement for Windows it needs a dose of hand-holding user friendliness.