Push came to shove in my personal IT infrastructure, and
Redmond lost the battle for my laptop. Now we'll find out if it sinks or swims
in the life of a non-Linux-geek PDF user who needs said computer as a working
office tool.After almost 20 years of Windows co-existing with the Macs in my life, I'd had
enough. Enough of duelling DVD codecs that turned video into snowstorms and
audio into screechy horror soundtracks. Enough of not being able to shut down
the machine for a half hour while I waited for Vista to install so-called
security updates and bug fixes, only to fall victim to new and insidious
strains of crudware. Enough of searching for and finding no Vista drivers for
hardware with which I'd become quite productive on XP and Mac.
Last Saturday, I kicked Vista to the curb and loaded my lapper—a perfectly
functional Dell Inspiron 600m—with Ubuntu.
One part of the decision had to do with stanching the flow of wasted time while
trying to keep an increasingly slower machine working under Vista and writing
off whole functions (like watching DVDs for review articles) in the process.
Another part had to do with an interview I did with Sarah Westervelt,
e- Waste Project Coordinator for the
Basel Action Network. She got me
thinking about all the toxic chemicals that probably lurked in the Dell:
mercury, cadmium, lead, and even hexavalent chromium. I was considering
landfilling it, because I was sick of <i>
trying to make the software work,</i> not because the
hardware was anywhere near the end of its life. But Westervelt's impassioned
arguments inspired me to make do with what I had for as long as I could.
A couple engineering and IT folks whose opinion I trust pointed me to Ubuntu,
knowing that I'd keep bugging them incessantly about fixing Vista problems if
they didn't. When it comes to computer OS issues and setting up hardware,
classify me as Everyman, or perhaps even a little less tech-savvy than that.
These guys know me better than I know myself—so they pointed me to what they
thought was the most user-friendly flavor of Linux.
Ubuntu turns out to be pretty painless to
install, and I got my wireless card running instantly. But in the PDF realm, there
are challenges: First off, goodbye Acrobat, which means I'm on my own with
tools like OpenOffice and Google Docs for creating PDFs. (I guess there will be
no four-color separations and no preflighting, callas style, for my prepress
files.) Adobe Reader runs well on Ubuntu, and fast. I'm quite curious to
experiment further with longer documents, and to see if Acrobat's
webconferencing software, Connect, runs better than on Mac or PC. People who
rely heavily on Firefox and Reader for viewing and navigating PDFs—and filling
out forms—have a head start; these two programs are virtually the same on
Ubuntu as they are elsewhere.
As for the rest of the tools the office user needs today (email, chat, word
processor, etc.), the open-source community seems to be busting its collective
hump to make applications that are equivalent to or in some cases better than
their feature-bloated commercial equivalents. The software isn't always as good
as the commercial stuff, but in most cases, it's good enough, and upgrades are
in development for a lot of the tools. Ubuntu makes software installation and
de-installation "point-and-click simple" for non-geeks who are
familiar with the Windows uninstall procedures, so if a particular app or
utility doesn't float your boat, crashes, or otherwise behaves badly, you can
quickly make it go away and try an alternative. <i>
And it's all free. </i>
Compared to when it was running Vista, the Dell's blazing fast. There is
under-the-hood stuff Linux requires, like the occasional "sudo"
command in the Terminal, a utility that reminds me of DOS on a bad day, akin to
battling ye olde XyWrite on deadline with an editor looking over your shoulder.
But the web's loaded with blogs and help forums populated with Linux people
invested in making this stuff work. Typically, they're friendly missionaries,
who speak in plain English because they want normal people like me to succeed.
That's a different experience than "working with" the people manning
the phones at Microsoft, some of whom charge for the pleasure of their tech
"help."
Don't get the wrong idea, I'm not painting a picture of some Ubun-topia. In
fact, I have to keep my desktop Mac running as my main machine. If Adobe were
to come out with a Linux Acrobat, ooh! I'd think about dumping my Mac, too. That
is, if I weren't so addicted to the iPod way of life. For now the Ubuntu
machine will be the mobile office from which I file stories on the road. Not a
toy or a "project" machine, this
has
to work or it's begrudgingly back to XP. That means wireless has to work
everywhere, the camera tools will have to enable picture downloads and simple
image manipulations, and sites like
Mashable
will have to show me how to port work tasks to the web that I can't do in
Ubuntu. But I have faith.
The personal computer landscape's kind of like the coming presidential
election: You're either Democrat or Republican. Tech-wise, it's likely you'll
stay affiliated with one of the two dominant political parties, Windows or Mac
OS. I'm not advocating that you vote for Ralph Nader, or anything kooky like
that. (Hey, I respect Nader, he tells it like it is and I agree with 96% of his
theses, but get real: He'll never win.) I will, however, say that if you can
afford to be off the PC grid—i.e., you can Google your way into self tech-help
and don't have to have a Windows machine to play in a Microsoft-based network
sandbox—putting Ubuntu on your machine might be one of the hottest productivity
upgrades you ever install.
