Firefox for instance – oh, sorry, Iceweasel – took a lot of Googling and about:configing before it felt the same as it did on Windows. Why some of those keys and things have changed is odd for me. Why has ^J for the download menu suddenly been switched to ^Y? Why use Alt instead of Ctrl for tab manipulation? Why doesn’t clicking the address bar auto-highlight it all? These just seem like weird changes to me.

I’ve installed a few extensions in Songbird. It says they’re installed but there’s no other sign of them. No way to run them. No obvious way to get to the iPod functions which apparently exist…

I’ve no idea what I’m supposed to be installing to get OpenGL to work. I need it to play Eve… (Which is apparently no longer in development…)

Installing things is also a little bit of work… I don’t know why more things don’t come with a set up wizard, like I’m so used to in Windows. Instead, I have to try and remember the switches for untaring things, putting them in the right place. Sometimes just guessing what I should be doing to run the damn thing.

This just isn't nice... It looks like it can't decide on what width to use for letters sometimes. Blatant attempts at adding extra pixels to make it more round.

Fonts are a weird, picky problem for me too. But I think that’s just because I’ve not played around with the defaults enough yet, to find one I actually like. Needs more anti-alias, and better kerning.

On the installation for Debian set up thing, I asked it to install a web server. That may exist, but I’ve no idea where to find it… My PHP pages aren’t giving me any errors, they just don’t seem to be outputting anything at all.

It’s just not new user friendly. I’m hoping that Ubuntu is much better in this domain, since that’s what it’s designed for really. So, I may be switching back to Windows some time soon. I don’t think my life can handle not having it as a primary operating system just yet. In the furutre though, I’ll defintely be installing another Linux OS on my next machine.

My Firefox seems to be getting laggy. Extensive JavaScript and Flash ads make my iTunes jump. I know it’s nothing to do with Firefox, and is probably more to do with my laptop being in near constant use for the last year without ever having much maintenance upon it. So, I’m thinking maybe it’s time to start afresh. Not just with a new Windows XP reinstall, but with a whole new operating system.

I think I’m going to be switching to Debian, before I do though, I want to make sure I won’t lose any programs that’re vital to me. I thought here would be a good place to go through them and check for alternatives.

Firefox – Not a problem at all.

Google Chrome – Not out for Linux just yet, but I only really use it for the Incognito option, which I could get a Firefox addon for. (Though, I’m sure it was a feature Firefox was going to have built in.)

Luke uses Chrome too when he’s at mine, just so our cookies don’t clash when he goes to the same sites as me. But there are other browsers for Linux if he desperately wants his own space. (Gosh, how much like a couple do we sound? He gets his own browser on my laptop? That’s on par with giving someone their own drawer in geek terms.)

Flash – According t their website, Adobe support Linux. Shockwave isn’t support on Linux, but I’m not sure where I use Shockwave…

MSN – I’m not especially a hardcore MSN user. Official MSN isn’t available on Linux, but the only features I really require are being able to talk to other MSN people, able to group contacts, a display picture and personal message, and file transfer.

There are a tonne of MSN alternatives out there, like Pidgin. I used that before and was okay with it. Pidgin’ll also let me sign onto Google Talk which I use all the time. I’d much prefer to be using one application rather than the two I have at the moment.

If I find out Pidgin doesn’t work so well for me, I could use KMess which was the first result for “linux msn” and seems to have all the features I mentioned about.

uTorrent – Not for Linux, but does run on Wine. I’m a little turned off by the idea of running an application to run an application though. Some people have said that they sometimes notice a jump of performance when running on Wine compared to natively on Windows. I certainly didn’t see that when I tried to play WoW through Wine though.

There’s always BitTorrent (which I thought used uTorrent as a backend, but I guess not). Or even command line, which I’ve been happy using before.

iTunes – Damnitdamnitdamnit. I knew if I was going to run into a problem it’d be with this SUCKY ASS PIECE OF SHIT.

iTunes isn’t supported on Linux. Completely uninstallable. Wine can’t run iTunes well. That basically turns my iPod into a brick. A £214 brick, which plays outdated music and has a spare 10gig just kicking around. This is actually a show stopper, much like WoW was back when I used to play it and couldn’t run it on Wine.

Lemme go see what #xkcd and #debian have to say about this problem.

Apparently, Songbird has some iPod support. I’ll install Songbird on my XP install in a bit to check how it pans out. If it all goes horribly wrong, I can just resync from iTunes, not losing any music. Problem potentially overcome.

Last.fm scrobbling – Songbird supports this.

PuTTY – I feel a little bit stupid for actually going to Google to search for this. Linux has native SSH support.

WinSCP – Nautilus handles this. WinSCP obviously doesn’t.

Microsoft Office 2007 – Here’s where I get worried again. This is pretty vital. Open Office is not an alternative.

Wine seems to make most parts of Office usable, at least. Some problems with how it handles objects (which are fairly new to Office), but nothing show stopping. If I do find something overly tedious, I’ll just take a trip to the library.

Norton Antivirus – Nope. But I don’t think it’s really needed.

14:42 < shamess> Don't laugh at me for asking this. What'd y'all use for antivirus and firewall stuff on linux?
14:42 < grawity> shamess: Nothing, usually.
14:42 < shamess> I thought that'd be the answer. But really, nothing at all?
14:43 < grawity> Well, there *is* ClamAV for scanning files, and iptables as a firewall...but they're rarely needed
on home machines.

I guess I’ll take my chances.

Dropbox – I actually don’t use this so much, but will probably be using it more in the future now that I’m getting other people to start using it. It’s downloadable in Fedora and Ubuntu, which isn’t helpful. But #xkcd said that Ubuntu has pretty much the same inner workings as Debian, so it could run just fine. If not, it’s not a huge loss.

Laptop drivers – I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro A-100 series. There’s no real way of knowing which drivers will and won’t work, however I’m going to run from live CD and that should check drivers and stuff. Not a problem, hopefully. A guy installed Debian on the same laptop as I have, and seemed to work fine when he updated a wireless setting.

Video/audio codecs – This is me trying to think of everything that could possibly go wrong now. The internet thinks that all my current files will still be playable. MP3′s will definitely, so will AVIs. That’s all I have really…

mIRC – I’ve actually just started using irssi on my server, so I’m not too fussed about that at the moment.

Notepad++ – Wine support only (though, good support). I’m not very attached to it anyway. Maybe this’ll give me a chance to start using VIM properly.

GIMP 2 – Full Debian support.

WAMP server – Maybe it’s about time I grew up and installed my own Apache, PHP and MySQL. I do it fine on my server.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2007 – Damnit again! Why are these big companies so obsessed with locking you into their operating system? I just paid a tonne of money to get this damn IDE, you’re not going to make much money off me installing your operating system too.

Wine looks iffy on this. Can’t boot Windows from a USB device because it doesn’t like losing contact with it’s boot drive, which is something that happens with USB connections from time to time. Maybe next year we won’t be using Visual Studio so much (hopefully) and it won’t be sorely lost. Maybe. I’ll email David Smallwood about it.

Smart Shutdown – cron.

MagicDisk – Don’t even need an application to mount ISOs on Linux.

WinRAR – Built in commands.

Foxit Reader – Available in Linux.

Skype – Linux version available.

TortoiseSVN - SVN command.

Audacity – Linx version availiable.