Mark Pilgrim, a high-profile blogger and life-long Mac user who recently caused a few ripples by switching to Ubuntu Linux, has written a nice list of essential software for Linux. Since he's coming from the land of iTunes, iPhoto, and Mail.app, the list is skewed toward Linux apps that replace (or at least approximate) their OS X counterparts. Pilgrim's picks include digiKam for photo management, amaroK for music, and KMyMoney ("like Quicken without the monopolistic dickwads"). However, there's a few apps he hasn't found an equivalent for, namely iMovie and Quicksilver ("Damn. I miss Quicksilver."). Head over to Dive Into Mark for the complete list.In other news another notable Mac user, Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow, is also about to make the Mac-to-Linux switch. I'm with Jason Kottke, who says, "If I were Apple, I'd be worried about this."
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-29-2006 @ 6:40PM
Alex Ezell said...
Bah, it's just a couple of nerds who want to try something new, like we all do. Since when do the fortunes of a company shift on the decisions of two dweebs in black t-shirts? If these Mac nerds had any balls, they would have had a Linux machine sitting in their office for the past few years like the rest of anyone whose job it is to actually develop things than to write about developing them.
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6-29-2006 @ 8:55PM
CheeseBurgerMan said...
He should take a look at Katapult for his Quicksilver replacement. Having never used a Mac, I dunno exactly how it compares, but I certainly love it. :-)
http://wiki.thekatapult.org.uk/Home
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6-30-2006 @ 2:35PM
dpratt said...
I think that they're going to find a much more difficult and frustrating road in front of them. I've been a linux user (and advocate) for over 10 years, but even Ubuntu isn't up there yet. For one thing, on a laptop, power saving modes and suspend-to-ram don't work. Ubuntu does not support WPA out of the box, and to add it is quite difficult.
All my home PCs run Linux, and I have a spare PC laptop that I try and install linux on with every major release of each of the big distributions (fedora, ubuntu, etc). To this date, I have yet to have an install that does all of the 'laptopy' things that you would expect without a bunch of work and a bunch of expert knowledge.
My laptops are all macs, and I don't see that changing any time in the future.
I think after a little bit of time, they're going to miss what the mac has to offer.
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7-01-2006 @ 9:09AM
Nigel Tao said...
Yes, he misses Quicksilver, but he does mention the GNOME Deskbar in the same breath as QS.
There is a screencast at http://blogs.gnome.org/view/nigeltao/2006/03/13/0 that might be worthy of your front page. :)
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7-08-2006 @ 10:51PM
Kevin M. said...
Dpratt what are you talking about? Theres a folder in my filesystem that says "laptop mode". Ubuntu handles my laptop phenominally well. Perhaps the PowerPC version is lacking in this area.
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