About once a year or so, I get the urge to see if I can switch from Windows to Linux on my desktop. I’m not saying I don’t use Linux, I just don’t use it on my desktop. I have a netbook with Ubuntu on it, a server with Red Hat, and several VMs running BSD, etc. The point is that my desktop is my main machine and every once in a while I try to see if I can do everything I use my desktop for in Linux. This years contender was a newbie to the scene: Linux Mint. I’ve heard good things about it, and I’ve heard it’s easier to use than Ubuntu (ease of use is definitely a plus for me on my desktop machine, trust me). So I downloaded the ISO and a copy of UNETbootin and proceeded… to fail. When the machine booted into Linux Mint (which by the way, is quite pretty), it worked fine. When I tried to install, X crashed consistently at around 90%. I tried an older version of Linux Mint with the same results. So we got an alternative contestant: Ubuntu 9.10 (amd64). I’d first like to point out that I am aware that the 64-bit version is likely to be buggier than the 32-bit version and that some software may not work or may not be available for the 64-bit version, but what’s the point of having 64-bit hardware if you can’t use it to its potential. This installed with no problems and was up and running in no time. Here are my findings this time around:

Hurdle #1: iTunes

I’ve grown accustomed to iTunes as a media library/pod catcher. In fact, I really like it for those functions (I’m a little sketchy about video playback but that’s a story for another time). What should I use for a replacement in Ubuntu? I went with Rhythmbox (which I like even more than iTunes) for audio and Miro for video. Rhythmbox held up it’s end of the bargain, but I don’t like the way that it dealt with or presented podcasts. I also never quite got MP3 playback working properly so it always told me that my podcasts were either missing or couldn’t be imported. Nonetheless, I could listen to music and download audio podcasts to my hearts content. Miro, on the other hand, failed me miserably.

After setting it up and giving it some feeds to work with it took an incredibly long time to download anything (while other apps on the computer screamed along at normal speeds), and once it downloaded, I couldn’t watch anything. Pressing play on a video caused Miro to crash every time. I also don’t like the way Miro deals with video podcasts. It sits in the system marked as new until I watch it and THEN a timer is set on when the video will be automatically deleted (if I choose that option, which I did). The lowest you can set this is one day. If I have to choose when a video is deleted based on when I’m done watching it, then I’d like it to be gone immediately. I’d rather just keep the last video in the feed until a new one comes along. Couple these 2 problems together and these videos essentially never go away, since I had to watch them in the Totem player or VLC. I also didn’t like that Miro couldn’t minimize to the status area, but that’s minor.

Ultimately, I decided (thanks to the wonders of Wine) that I would just knuckle down and install iTunes on the machine. Thanks to Apple, this was impossible. I downloaded the newest version of iTunes from the website and ran the installer. According to the installer, there was no problem but when I tried to run iTunes, I couldn’t find it. The installer hadn’t done anything to the “C drive” in Wine. I tried again and managed to get Quicktime and Bonjour installed, but still no iTunes. Looking on the internet I found that I needed to install an older version of iTunes for it to work. But at this point Quicktime and Bonjour for the new version were installed and Wine wouldn’t uninstall them and every time I ran the installer for the older version, it would error out telling me it couldn’t install Quicktime.

Hurdle #2: Netflix

Being that I don’t currently have a TV or a way to watch Netflix “Watch Instantly” service (my Roku is in the basement of a friend in Michigan), I use this service like a mad man on my desktop. The last time around I remember having this issue because “Watch Instantly” used Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 and Moonlight (the open source clone of Silverlight) was only compatible with Silverlight 1.0, but there was progress being made in 2.0 compatiblity. Now, I find out that Netflix switched to Silverlight 3.0 just as Moonlight 2.0 was becoming available. Is it so wrong that I want to be able to stream movies to my computer that runs Linux? Apparently, according to Netflix and Microsoft, it is.

Hurdle #3: Flash

A lot of websites use flash to some degree. I needed to be able to use flash and I needed to be able to use Flash 10 specifically. There’s a beta out of Flash 10 that’s available for Linux. There’s a super kludgy way to get it working on 64-bit Ubuntu. It works, but it doesn’t work consistently or in a predictable manner.

Hurdle #4: Synchronicity

A friend of mine recently wrote about how he uses syncing tools to keep his profiles relatively consistent between computers (http://www.crthomas.org/?p=198 and http://www.crthomas.org/?p=180). I recently took this to the extreme and installed a number of portable apps (http://www.portableapps.com) into my drop box which I sync among my different computers. The problem that I’ve run into here is now that I’m using Ubuntu, how to I sync all these apps? Actually, I dealt with this in a rather ingenious way! I’ve you create a sym link from where your Firefox profile SHOULD be that points to the profile in the drop box, Firefox works flawlessly. There are a few minor problems if you have version discrepancies, but it’s mostly with extensions and a restart will magically resolve them.

Thunderbird refuses to work though I’m guessing this is a result of Ubuntu running Thunderbird 2 and my drop box having Thunderbird 3 installed.

Pidgin has actually been the weirdest. It doesn’t read the profile as it exists in the drop box, but it will write to it :/

Hurdle #5: Games

While I don’t play a lot of video games, I do still play them every now and again. I am especially a sucker for the Civilization line of games and what with the newest in the series (Civilization 5) coming out later this year, I don’t think my poor little heart can take not being able to play it. FreeCiv is a reasonable facsimile of the Civilization games but it doesn’t quite cut the mustard for the latest and greatest.

As I mentioned with iTunes, it is possible that I could install this with Wine, and it may work competently (I ran Star Wars Galaxies over Wine on Ubuntu with a minimum of problems a couple years ago).

All in all though, I think I’ll be switching back to Windows on my desktop in the near future.