After 5 years spent with my PowerBook G4, which was an admirably well conceived laptop and 1 year with a MacMini; as the later was meant to become a multimedia center, he is now coupled with a nice FullHD TV and I am back using Linux Debian for my daily work and no computer for my private stuff.
Before switching to Mac I was living a happily windowless live( the 5 years before my switch to mac) with Linux. The last distribution I used for at least 2 years was Gentoo. But it went from hard to very hard and time consuming to manage; and I had less time to be my own system developer/administrator, so I decided to give Mac a try.
Desktop April 2010
Neverless I have to admit that Debian changed a lot the last 6 years. I had a solid experience with all kind of Linux distributions; but now-days Debian has surpassed all my expectation. The documentation is clear, the installation is easy, the Debian guidelines are well established; the life-cycle(install, upgrade, maintain) of the Debian OS is a charming never-ending story. You get instant access and fine-grained control of the installed packages.
You can choose to install bleeding-edge software from the experimental repository, or stick to very stable packages best suited for a production environment. The major levels are: Stable ==> Testing ==> Experimental
At my work we make full use of Debian’s capabilities! On my laptop I have installed everything from the testing branch, so I can use the latest software which is candidate for becoming stable. On our server we use exclusively Debian stable.
Do I miss my Mac? Yes.
Recently I made a slideshow on a Mac with a combination of:
- Gimp for images retouch
- Blender3D for bluescreen takes
- iTunes keep track of the sound
- GarageBand sound recording and transformation
- iPhoto mange all the Photos
- iMovie cut the whole thing togehter
I knew what the project would be and started right away with the first scene. That’s nearly magical, for that kind of project I really get more done on a Mac. Would it be feasible under Linux? Yes! Let’s Look at the list of software we could use:
- Gimp [ok]
- Blender3D [ok]
- Amarok, replacment for iTunes[ok]
- Audacity + Ardour replacment ofr GarageBand [ok]
- Picasa, replacment for iPhoto [ok]
- Kino, replacement for iMovie [ok]
To put together this small list, it took me 4 hours of searching the web, read reviews, comparing applications and not a single scene done yet; therefor it’s great to have a huge pool of application to choose from but I really prefer to have 4 application which get 90% of the work done.
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