Confessions of a Linux newbie

When I was preparing to go self-employed, one of the things to which I looked forward was breaking free from the shackles of corporate IT and being the master of my own computer setup.

One consequence of this is that, for the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with Linux.  I’ve had an interest in the open source movement for some time and have long used open source software, but always until now on Windows PCs.  As soon as I was working from home, it became necessary to buy another computer since my wife also works at home and demand for the main PC in the house was outstripping supply.  So I treated this as an opportunity to see whether it would be feasible to make the switch to a totally open source setup.

I may have been spurred on to do this by my experience of working with the gentlemen from the Open Source Consortium, during my last job at the BBC Trust.  They were concerned to make sure the BBC was more sensitive to Linux users in its provision of video on-demand and were persuasive in their advocacy of open source computing generally.  I felt I owed it to myself professionally to deepen my own understanding.

The first advantage became apparent at purchase.  I began by looking for a decent, used laptop on eBay to recondition.  Then I realised I could buy a new one from Dell for under £300 with the Ubuntu version of Linux pre-installed.  Everything worked out of the box, the machine picked up our wifi connection right away, and I was ready to go.

Ubuntu comes bundled with familiar programmes like Open Office and Firefox.  On the whole, I’d say these seem to work more seamlessly than they do on Windows.  I thought this might be my imagination, but I’m told there are good technical reasons why this might be the case.  Less appealing is Ubuntu’s bundled email client, Evolution, which is supposed to be compatible with Microsoft Exchange server.  I found the performance of Evolution far too flaky – with the cache having to be cleared out manually more or less every day in order to see an up to date picture of my inbox.  After some weeks of irritation, this actually turned out to be an advantage since it prompted me to ditch the Exchange account I’d been using for email and save myself £80 a year.

I’d been using Exchange largely because it offers push-email to my Windows Mobile phone but I also liked the way my calendar and task list was kept up to date across my phone and computers.  Counter-intuitively, I found these things were becoming less important to me as a self-employed agent.  I like to receive email alerts when I’m on the move, but I resist the temptation to reply to them until I’m back at a computer since emails composed on the move and on a fiddly little device somehow come out terse and abrupt.   My phone now collects my email via IMAP once an hour, and I’m rediscovering the joys of using Thunderbird to manage email on my computers.  Thunderbird can handle multiple email identities with ease and using IMAP means my email is always kept in sync across the PC, Linux machine and phone.

The solution for my calendar and tasks was to switch to web applications which bypasses the need to find software which works across different platforms.  I use Google Calendar and sync it with my phone two or three times a day using OggSync.  I don’t know why I ever thought it was useful to make sure the calendar on my computer was updated as I added events on my phone.  I’m the sole user of my calendar so there’s no danger of anyone adding conflicting events.

I manage my tasks with Remember the Milk which is a thing of beauty when it comes to personal productivity tools.  I’d been aware of this highly-rated service for some time and hadn’t seen what the fuss was about.  Now I’d say the simple power of its lists, tags and search filters has to be experienced to be appreciated.  It also provides a stunningly good scaled-down experience when accessed by mobile phone (which can’t be said of Google Calendar).

Finding a solution to sync my contacts across the different machines is proving elusive, but not a huge problem.  I use a plugin to Thunderbird called Zindus to sync email addresses that I use; not ideal but good enough.

For word processing, spreadsheets and so forth, I’ve switched completely from Microsoft Office to Open Office.  In theory, Open Office should handle Microsoft Office documents with ease and you should be able to use whichever application is available and takes your fancy.  But I’ve never found this to be the case, and Open Office currently can’t even open the Office 2007 format (something which will be rectified in its next major release).  So I find it easier to work with Open Office across my Windows and Linux machines and convert documents which I’m sending to other people.

So for basic computing needs a Linux set up works very well – especially in the context of cloud computing, where much of our data and the applications we use are actually held online.  Good, freely available software means it’s possible to run a comprehensive basic setup without hassle.

But for anything slightly tricky, the benefits of Microsoft’s network effects soon tell and the clunkiness of Linux becomes tiresome.  Linux can talk to Windows XP machines very easily, but it can’t network with our Windows Vista PC which means it can’t share the printer attached to this machine and I have to use a (paid-for) sync programme called Powerfolder to gain access to my files across computers.  I’m also having difficulty getting the Linux machine to connect to the internet through my new mobile broadband stick from T-Mobile [see footnote below].  For these more complicated requirements, you have to program the machine using the command line and the documentation available is not particularly penetrable for a non-technical user.

Ubuntu, with its Windows-like graphical user interface, hides many of the machine’s configuration possibilities behind the command line.  It’s a good option if you want a reliable computing environment and with which you don’t intend to tinker much.  Conversely, if you’re a techie, it presents a highly configurable environment which you can customise completely to your needs.  The problem arises if you fall between these two extremes.  Someone like me, who’s pretty technically minded but by no means a coding expert, has no option but to ascend the learning curve and get stuck in.  So what you save on financial outlay you lose again on the time you have to commit to manage your IT.

The Microsoft computing environment has its own frustrations, but I can’t yet see a scenario where I’d be prepared to say goodbye to it for ever.

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[Footnote: T-Mobile, incidentally, sold this to me with an explicit assurance that it supported Linux so brownie points are in short supply for them.]