Linux - the adventure begins...

Just a suggestion, which you probably won't try but I'll try anyway....


Apple provides it's iWork productivity suite FREE in an online browser-based version and it's system neutral. that is, as long as you have a Windows or Linux with a browser, you can go to this webpage, register (any email address will do, doesn't have to be an Apple address), and use Pages, Keynote, and Numbers to your heart's content. Inserting audio and video into documents can be easily done.


Not that this will happen, but the suite software itself comes free and installed if you ever do breakdown and buy any apple device. But for now, it's free, available (albeit a browser-based version) on ANY device, and all it will cost you is an email address.


P.S. The iTunes for Windows app has some incredible FREE Educational Resources (audio, video, text) in the iTunes U section.

If Linux is the rebel alliance - loosely organized, skeptical cannon fodder living in the seventies, prone to poor decision making and still hysterically focused on that single glaring flaw within the death star - then Apple is in a whole nother galaxy, and is still the Borg.

The only aspect of the free-and-open-source movement that I genuinely do believe is the one they don't exactly spell out: that very large companies do with government support treat "the internet" as some kind of terra nulis that shall rightly be pillaged of whatever is discovered there because whatever is discovered there is a natural and unowned resource. I am thus deeply skeptical of online productivity suites. I am not interested in trading away my content for the opportunity to create that content, noting of course that much of this "content" is in fact not mine and all I did was reorganize it but still, screw them, because reorganization is effortful and is worth money.

Ironically, I will put stuff on a wordpress blog. Contradiction? Not exactly. I trade away my organization of content for the opportunity to display that content to others. With a productivty suite, I trade away my organization of content for the opportunity to.... organize content. Not an interesting deal.

Free is not free. We have always been at war with eastasia.

Oops, forgot the link: http://beta.icloud.com

Tried out for my Debian merit badge. Debian 8 Jessie. Nope. I like it fine. It even seems like it may be a tad more responsive than whatever mess of Ubuntu I had on the machine previously. But... nope. Even that level of user unfriendliness was more than I want to deal with right now. It seems to me like Linux is a system administrator's operating system, and the further one moves from Ubuntu the more that becomes clear. I shall go back to a clean Ubuntu Gnome 16.04.2 LTS.

And then I discovered elementary OS...

Why I was looking at Debian was the assumption it'd be a stripped down Ubuntu. (It sort of is, but then it's not too because it's freakishly frontloaded with games?!?!?). I also assumed it was going to be prettier because it does have the better default wallpaper. (It's not prettier - the default fonts look like pixelated poop.) So on the way back to Ubuntu I decided to look again at Xubuntu and... wait for it... this other distribution touted as design-oriented... elementary OS.

Dude, it's just really, really pretty. And brisk, particularly the pantheon-files. And STRIPPED DOWN! It has virtually no cruft. It doesn't even come with a default Office suite! SWEET!


You know what else? You'll like this: it's well designed, it's pretty, it's fast: IT'S A FREAKIN MAC OS CLONE!!!


http://blog.elementary.io/post/152626170946/switching-from-macos-the-basics

I'm liking this Loki, I think I might keep it.

elementary OS 0.4.1, aka "Loki", is brisk, efficient, and attractive to look at. Basically it appears to be the best of both worlds, a Mac OS design philosophy on top of Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS - fast, attractive, and it doesn't just work ( ). You still have to go looking for a fair amount of sudo arcana before the whole thing is properly functional. By the time they get to a 1.0 release, perhaps that will have changed. Meanwhile, for my old SL400 the wifi driver is a bit wonky (not always present at reboot) and the proprietary Radeon graphics driver might be puttng shivers on the screen, but the good seems like it outweighs the bad. I do like the Gnome desktop on Ubuntu Gnome, but this Pantheon desktop in elementary is better. Good enough even to make me think having a dock could be okay. WPS Office does seem to crash a lot, but we'll see.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And now... Lubuntu!

Easy to like, because:

- GUI is easily set up to work like Windows 7 and thus be an actual USER interface as opposed to a FILE SYSTEM interface (even if using the main menu involves a LOT of hunting through categories...)

but mostly (b)

- thus far it hasn't once frozen or crashed, which makes it quite a bit different from GNOME on this machine.


elementary OS still is the most attractive (though it took them six years to produce a 0.4 release and it's going to be a while before it stops being just a tad too rudimentary), and GNOME 3 is better than Unity (inasmuch as Unity and/or GNOME 2 is what stopped me liking Ubuntu before) but currently I'm thinking the LXDE interface is functional enough to be the winner.

 

Lubuntu ftw.

This one installation of 32 bit lubuntu 16.04.2 LTS has yet to seize up and require a reboot. (Well, Tixati did seize up that one time and it took out the mouse with it, but everything else stayed operational long enough for me to find out how to work the terminal and kill a seized program.) Indeed, the whole installation has stayed functional entirely long enough for me to start finding out about actual workflow. (I used this machine to gather and grade that assload of makeup exams - and it worked fine.)

I have mentioned this before, but the test machine is an old Thinkpad SL400 (Intel Core 2 Duo), which technically is nearly ten years out of date. But it has an NVIDIA GPU, 2GB RAM, and a 120GB SSD, so it's not that crappy.

What do other people run Linux on? I don't know.

And finally, a China-specific question: fcitx or Sogou?

Personally, I've always assumed Sogou Pinyin beams information back to the mothership. Meanwhile, fcitx Sunpinyin seems to work fine as a way of writing Chinese characters so I'll go with that one.

QQ on Ubuntu?

Do I even want to know? The internet tells me QQ for Linux is basically discontinued and the appropriate alternative is use Wine QQ from Kylin or Android QQ with an emulator. Is there anything more internationally straightforward?

I want to like Linux, but nvidia driver issues suck the life out of everything

Installing Arch Linux sucks all the parts of everything unless you remember to put all the China mirrors at the top of /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

that is all

Manjaro Mate

sucketh less than other installations.


Still cartoony.

I've been thinking of Linux desktop environments as computer interfaces rather than user interfaces.

Debian Xfce

i like Manjaro better on principle because no more ppa nonsense, but being that famous thing, a rolling release, it is the forever download option. Debian being the rarely download and tutt-tutt don't ppa option, might well be the right compromise.

Also, out of the box I like the Brisk menu on Mate until there being no way to customize starts to suck and the Whisker menu on Xfce starts to shine.

if LibreOffice didn't seem to suck so much relative to Microsoft Office (and XPS Office weren't so abandonware nor so suspect because of it's origin), I think I might well have found my preferred distribution.

Manjaro "Mikah" + Chromium + OnlyOffice might actually be okay.

OnlyOffice still won't do animations in presentations but whatever.