Post Ubuntu - Humanity Towards Machines
I’ve just this week switched to work completely in Ubuntu7 from XP, which has had all sorts of knock-on effects all over the place. So far, a mixed bag, at least until I iron out what I assume will be creases that allow themselves to be ironed. That’s the whole linux thing right? You don’t like it, change it.
The good things though, are great. Workspaces are a revelation, allows you to navigate those times when you have eight windows open, four of them with multiple tabs themselves. It’s the first time I’ve done anything more than just play about with them for the novelty factor, and already I growl at the Windows PCs at work for being so desperately backwards.
The availability, ease of access and so-far the quality of the software available is also brilliant. Want some software? ten minutes, fully operational, free, and not something that you’ll get to know only to find that the triall has disabled save and export.
Have been playing with Ardour http://ardour.org/ a digital audio workstation, which looks like it could offer all kinds of possibilities that I am yet to properly explore. Lovely to have that software naivety featuring in creative processes again though.
The other big difference is in having a sensible text editor to play with after spending the last few weeks hand-coding with notepad in xp. Automatic recognition of css js and html syntax and automatic coloration is a godsend as is tabbed editing. Dramatically cuts down on open windows and is simply a very good idea.
On the negative side, it does seem to have broken the web. If this is what the IE development people are struggling to avoid, then I have at last some sympathy. Having used firefox on xp, it’s never really been an issue, but the first forays into the outside world using ubuntu were rather painful. The main issue was lack of fonts - what with the web being built on verdana arial and times, but that was relatively easily rectifiable.
The larger, and as of now unresolved issue lies somewhere around the screen resolution, which insists on rendering pages with incredibly small font size. Which in turn means that yuo have to adjust up to beyond normally reasonable levels to read anything, which, on most sites means that design goes mostly out of the window. Any time images get heavily involved the results are horrible. An experience to use as a lesson perhaps. Also there seem to be only two resolutions available by default, one far too high, the other far too low. There must be a way to solve this. The next challenge.
Overall though, brilliant and free.
