Why I love Linux
As a casual gamer, I game. I game with Cedega and I game with Wine. Occasionally, I’ll also enjoy a native game or two.
While enjoying an exuberant game of WarCraft III, I will occasionally have some downtime and use it to check my messages. This requires switching from the game to another application. In the ol’ Windows days, this would be done with an alt+tab. You’d hit the two magic keys, blink your eyes and hope that the screen changed states by the time your eyes opened. Of course, it never would. You’d always open your eyes with disappointment, and wait a couple more seconds until Windows woke up and decided to do something useful.
Although Linux is faster with the window switching to begin with, desktop switching is in a league of its own. When I was a young and unwise penguin, I scoffed at and avoided virtual desktops. Also, in the same streak of naivety, I always used to maximize my windows — but that’s a different rant altogether. But now, by allocating different purpose to each virtual desktop, my productivity flourishes. And I can save a few precious eye blinks — dry eyes be damned!
One for web browsing and chat, one for music and file browsing, one for development or gaming, and one to bind them all.
When I play some WarCraft III DOTA on desktop #3 and I get pinched to death by the Sand King, I can spend the 40 seconds it takes to respawn productively by replying to pending messages on desktop #1. And quickly switch to desktop #2 to change songs before going back into battle.
There was a slight issue of Gaim opening its new message windows in whatever desktop was currently active, but that’s easily fixed with awesome desktop managers like KDE by restricting the application’s window class to a specific desktop. Yay.
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Out of curiosity, do you know how to do that with gnome? That’s been bothering me for a while (the gaim window ‘issue’), and I’d like to fix it.
Thanks.
Devil’s Pie is what you’re looking for. It’s a very flexible window-controlling utility, runs on a scheme-like scripting language.
Thank you. I’ll look into this when I’m less intoxicated.
what distro of linux do you run? also, how are your experiences with getting games to run on cedega and wine?
I run Gentoo. I’ve been able to play pretty much every game that I wanted to play with Cedega and Wine, but I don’t play many games anymore.
Just look at the rating here:
http://transgaming.org/gamesdb/
And here:
http://appdb.winehq.org/
If others have made it works, you probably wont have too much trouble making it work either.
Thanks.
I’m in the process currently of switching my laptop to Linux, and trying to overcome hurdles (like getting the wireless to work, among other things). Right now I’m using Fedora Core 5, but I’m thinking of changing, not sure though.
I don’t play many games anymore either, but when I do, I’d like to be able to play them, rather than rebooting (because then I get lazy and don’t go back to Linux).
I’m also looking for a good PHP editor, I have PHPEclipse but it doesn’t have an FTP editor as far as I can tell. Any input on that area would be fantastic.
If you don’t feel like spending a lot of time screwing around with things, Ubuntu is probably the way to go. Especially on a laptop. The downside of Gentoo is that it’s a sources-only distro, so you need to compile everything you want to install (with the exception of a few packages like Open Office, Firefox, etc). It’s not so bad, but if you don’t have a fast machine, it’s a lot of waiting.
In terms of an IDE, I use KDE’s Kate. It’s not a full-pledged IDE as such (it doesn’t have an embedded debugger, autocomplete, etc), but I love it to death anyways. I like the interface, the powerful search functionality, and it’s very fast.
If you want a more hard-core tool, try something like vim or emacs. ;-)
I’ve used emacs, but the billion commands are just a little too confusing right now. At school I think they might try to teach us emacs so I’ll just wait for that if it happens.
I looked at Ubuntu and it looks neat, but the sudo root thing didn’t appeal to me much. I’m familiar with certain things in Linux like navigation, basic commands and not to use root when I’m not doing something essential, but I’m also not that experienced.
I feel that if I can get my music files over to Linux and play them correctly, I’ll be 90% complete, which means I won’t have to go to Windows for much. My music is mostly in .m4a format from iTunes, and the last time I tried (which was on Fedora Core 4) I couldn’t get it working.
In terms of Gentoo, it sounds interesting and maybe I’ll take a look at it once I become more familiar with using Linux. I’ve got a decently fast laptop so speed isn’t a concern for me in terms of compiling.
Mainly my problem is when I look for help online for acertain subject, I get lost somewhere in the “edit this file to say this and change these specs to do this”. Oh well, when I get off work I’ll spend a considerable amount of time working on it.
A quick Google query revealed some useful links for using m4a on linux, such as converting them to mp3 or running them in xmms with a plugin or running it natively with AmaroK (a good replacement for iTunes).
Regarding the sudo root philosophy — it’s a very good practice. It may seem annoying, but in the long run it’s a very good habit to get into. If you really need a root shell, you can always do
sudo su.Gentoo, on the other hand, is significantly harder to use, but at the same time you’d learn a lot more. It’s very well documented, and has a very big and knowledgeable community.
Linux is all about choice, so make your own. :-)
In regards to the music - I’ve looked at a ton of pages on this. In the past they have not worked and I haven’t tried with the current installation (which I plan on doing when I get home, if I don’t get side tracked).
When I have more time (probably during the school year, or on certain breaks) I plan to install other distros and see which one I like best. I might get a new desktop soon, and if I do that would be the prime place to do so (I’ve come to the conclusion that installing Linux on a laptop to learn probably isn’t the easiest way).
Currently I’m looking up features of KDE and Gnome to get some insight on which would be the best for me. I plan to try out KDE when I get home for a bit, but I’ve always used Gnome. amaroK does look pretty cool though.