Filled with dissatisfaction with windows, I set off on a quest to find a suitable Linux distribution for the Acer Aspire D250-1165. It came with Windows XP, but the performance was always less than impressive and Windows is a magnet for spyware and botnet clients. The machine is theoretically highly compatible and thus support should be simple, right?
I have often heard from a broad variety of pundits about how Linux is not a mature, enterprise-class Unix. All discussion over how "Linux is a kernel" aside, today I have encountered the first piece of evidence that suggests to me that this is true. It seems that no Linux distribution has a simple "repair permissions" tool. This was a standard feature of package managers of UNIX systems before Linux was even dreamt of, for example in Solaris.
SimCity is one of the most popular and well-known video games of all time. This game was ported to Unix in the 1990s and the source code has since been released under the GPL version 3. Micropolis is the resulting program (as well as the original working title of the game.) Making this game work correctly is easy enough once you know the recipe.
I've been using Linux for a long time, and I learned to use it by installing it and using it as my primary operating system — as far as I'm concerned, the year of the Linux desktop was in 1994 or so. Since then I've actually bounced around to a variety of operating systems and even single-booted my primary machine into Windows XP by choice, using Cygwin as a crutch. I've been running Linux solidly since Ubuntu Dapper, using Windows only on inferior (and seldom-activated) computers or in virtual machines to close corner cases like my mobile phone. Throughout that time, I have basically never been satisfied with the default appearance of the system.
This is a pretty simple one: Printing on Linux sucks. Adobe knows more about printing than anybody. Printing PDFs on Linux with Adobe Reader is wonderful. Conclusion: See title. For further discussion, see below.
The Adobe Reader 8 print dialog (custom theme based on Scalable-6nome and Darkilouche)
Not too long ago, I switched entirely to Ubuntu for my Linux needs. Long-disenchanted with RedHat, I eventually skipped out on gentoo because I am lazy, and meanwhile I never found a compelling reason to run SuSe. I had begun using Debian Linux for servers and was very happy (in general) with the dpkg system, and along came Debian-based Ubuntu with unparalleled hardware support. I like to run Linux from a single vendor if possible since it simplifies things considerably, so now everything is based on some flavor of Ubuntu. In looking for a firewall GUI configurator which would run on and configure my laptop-based firewall system, I settled on fwbuilder.
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