Linux Desktop Part 2
A quick report on my two-week-old Linux desktop experiment.
Good Things First:
- It’s flexible alright. I can pretty much find apps to do anything I need, minus a few stragglers.
- It’s not ugly anymore. The Unity desktop is pretty decent looking and runs well on the laptop.
- VS Code is really nice on Linux, just as it is on Windows. Awesome tool.
- Chef is really easy to use and works great in the Linux environment. It works pretty well in Windows, too, but things definitely “felt” smoother in Linux.
Bad Things:
- The machine locks up from time-to-time, particularly between docked and undocked configurations. I have a dock with 2 monitors, and it doesn’t always work when I dock without restarting.
- There are still some obvious apps missing.
- Google doesn’t have a native, free Google Drive client. There’s one on the market (OverGrive) that works well, but it costs $5.
- No Skype for Business client. That really sucks. + At least 3 times my toolbars at the top of the windows have hung up, leaving me clicking on blank spots where the icons for close, minimize, and maximize should be. Totally strange. + Oddly, Google Chrome places the min/max/close buttons on the upper-right of the window, while every other app has them on the upper-left. That’s confusing and annoying. + Java is a total pain in the ass to get going. Why is it not just something either included or just an apt-get away in a built-in repository?
I will say that Linux works as a desktop decently, but the bugs, particularly with docking and undocking, are pretty annoying and would never fly for the average user. Maybe it isn’t meant to be used by the average user, but I would think it would still be encouraged. Canonical is working to get a phone on the market, so I don’t think they are trying to be “geek only”.
As for this guy, I think it’s time to go back to Windows. I think I’ll reinstall everything tomorrow and build a Linux VM to work from if necessary. I’m not running away out of frustration or anything else, it just feels to me like the bugs aren’t worth the hassle. I’m not going to spend my evenings or spare time trying to fix the source, so I may as well just go back to something that works.