WARTY review

[Tommy Trussell]

On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 21:32:35 -0800, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at canonical.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 10:43:51PM -0600, Tommy Trussell wrote:
> 
> > I'll probably continue to run Debian or Mac OS X on the servers and
> > other systems around me
> 
> What is missing that would win you over? :-)

There's no big thing really MISSING from Ubuntu -- I just consider it
to be useful for a different kind of setting than I have right now.

I use Debian when I need to install a stripped-down or otherwise
highly customized system on an Intel box, especially when I'm
installing on an ancient throwaway PC that I want to use for a file
server or whatever. (Last I tried I couldn't install Ubuntu on my
Pentium 200MMX system with a 2-gig boot drive, but the Ubuntu live CD
booted just fine.)

I use Mac OS 9 or Debian on the "oldworld" Macs I have sitting around
(most of the stuff sitting here at this moment, but most are on the
way out). I still have a lot of software I'm using on OS 9 that I'm
gradually migrating to open-source equivalents, and mol has been very
helpful in that transition.

We have an iBook G4 running OS X, and I need to be conversant in OS X
just because that's what newer Macs have, and there are some really
great things on it. I'm not dependent upon any OS X software though. I
might try Ubuntu on the iBook but that machine is not "mine" so I feel
like I've already put too much junk on it. (Is it possible to remove
fink, for instance?) My son is practically addicted to Apple's Garage
Band -- maybe someday there will be a linux equivalent.

One application I actively use that I have not found a clear
equivalent on GNU/linux is Macromedia Fireworks. It has some features
that I find very useful when I'm throwing together an image quickly.
I'm sure you could get good enough using the GIMP to do equivalent
work but for whatever reason Fireworks works like I think. I
especially like that its native file format is png -- you can open a
file in other programs without conversion.

In another thread somebody mentioned BBEdit, and it's true that there
are few apps that manage plain text so well (things like "zapping
gremlins" and other useful manipulations you run into when you cross
platforms). I'm sure you will find someone who will say that emacs has
done EVERYthing BBEdit can do since the 1970s... but that's another
topic.

Anyway... I don't think Ubuntu would be very well served by trying to
become MY primary distro -- though I don't doubt that I may have more
Ubuntu systems running around here in the future.

As I implied before I'm using it because I believe it builds on the
strengths of Debian and is focused in a way I believe will be easier
(for me) to support.