Silenced Poets

A few years ago I, as everyone in my family, had only used Microsoft operating systems. Anything else was completely foreign to me. I managed to acquire a brand new Powerbook G4, one of the very last ones, as soon after I got it the move to Intel was pushed forward and the first Macbooks were released. Hardware aside, I was exposed to something new and after struggling at first to adapt, I was becoming used to doing things in a different way. A little less than a year later I decided to try Ubuntu on the aging eMachines desktop that my Powerbook had replaced for me. After installing it, and I did have a few problems, but that was long ago, there was a question of now what do I do? I kept chugging along on my Powerbook. Eventually that was replaced by an Intel Mac. This afforded me many new opportunities through virtualization. I began to experiment with VMware Fusion virtual machines running various Linux and BSD virtual machines, but I was still extremely wary of the command-line interface. For a course I was taking I began to learn LaTeX to markup the mathematics as well as using Ubuntu (over two years after I first tried it!) to create a cluster that involved a fair amount of command -line. This combined with my purchase of a netbook (for taking notes, or at least copying my notes over) led me to begin to use Arch Linux.

So some things I'm going to miss since I've switched:

iCal
If someone has a good replacement for this for linux then I'm all ears. For now I'm using the lightening plug-in for Thunderbird, which so far is working alright, but it isn't laid out quite as nice as iCal.

Spaces
I am well aware that many people truly do not like Spaces and it works against them for multiple desktops. For me, however, (and this may just be because I "grew" with it) it worked and was a simple way to handle different workspaces.

TextMate
This might be my favorite Mac application. Now I don't want to start a holy war of vi(m) vs. Emacs. I want a graphical text editior (preferably without the giant learning curve of either of those) that can do syntax highlighting and code folding. I'm trying geany but I haven't spent enough time with it to really know if it is a replacement yet or not.

Application/Device Support
I am a fairly utilitarian person and I am going to miss the support for certain things. For what I want to do the music applications on Linux are simply not up to snuff. There is also support for the iDevices (which I would only want again for applications that are not available otherwise, but that is a seperate post). Lastly is being able to use multiple monitors. Linux can do this most certainly, but I have not been able to get either of the open source drives for my card (ATI Radeon 2600 HD) or the closed fglrx to work when I have more than one display hooked up. I've already spent too many hours on just that, I'm done trying for now. Also get NVIDIA is NOT a solution, if OS X can handle it then Linux should be able to as well.

That is all for now, I'll talk about what I've liked and some more in a later post.