(Warning: Non-economics post).

A few weeks ago, I took the plunge and switched my computer from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux. Overall it’s been a pretty good experience. Ubuntu is fast and stable, and the interface is pretty clean and efficient. A few random observations:

I couldn’t live without MS Office, but using Crossover Linux I can run Office XP flawlessly (although I’ve only tried Word, Excel and Powerpoint, not Access or Outlook). OpenOffice is good, but its compatibility with MS Office is not 100%, so MS Office is essential if you want to work with other people on documents.

I also couldn’t live without Scientific Workplace (a wordprocessor for technical documents with an integrated computer algebra system). I tried Lyx + Maxima, but both have their shortcomings. Lyx can’t handle complex formatting but uses a special file format, so you can’t edit the Latex code by hand (as far as I can tell). And it’s too clumsy to re-type equations into Maxima for analysis. I solved this problem by using QEMU which allows you to run Windows inside Linux, using emulation. It’s a little slow, but it works fine and allows me to keep using Scientific Workplace.

There are two main desktop window manager systems available for Linux, “K” and “Gnome”. There are some differences in user interface standards between the two. Applications written for one will work on the other, but the interface can look a bit odd if you use a program written for one system inside the other, and some of the conventions are different, such as whether a double or single click is used to open folders. I really think the Linux community should standardise on one or the other. It’s hard enough to get people to switch from Windows without fragmenting the Linux market even further.

The default Ubuntu pdf viewer, Evince, sucks and I haven’t been able to find a better one (any suggestions?). It does dumb things like remembering your print settings when you close the program, so if you print “current page” this time, it will also default to printing the current page next time you use it, unless you remember to reset the print settings. Its search function is also very limited and a bit stupid. You can only navigate results by using “Next” and “Previous” buttons. With long documents, skipping though the search results can send you back to the first result before the program has finished searching the rest of the document. Imagine you have a 1000 page document, and just skipped through 10 results. Then you press “Next” the 11th time, and it sends you back to the first result, while it’s still searching the rest of the document, which takes a long time with 1000 pages. Now to get to result #11, you have to press “Next” another 11 times …

Finally, the “Gimp” image manipulation program is simply no match for Photoshop. It doesn’t have as many tools, especially for adjusting photos, and it’s very slow with large images. It also handles “camera raw” files from digital SLRs pretty badly. To be honest, this might be the thing that sends me back to Windows, unfortunately.