For the most part, my two week experience was fun. I’ve used Linux as a desktop before, but I’d always get bored and boot back into Windows. The biggest frustration for me is not in any configuration that has to be done, it’s in the lack of good apps. (Believe it or not, the fact that an app is running on Linux does not automatically make it awesome.) For instance, Bluefish. Cool at first, until you realize how buggy it is. When using parentheses the highlighting sometimes breaks and leaves part of your file completely unformatted. You can fix it by hitting F5 to refresh, but this is a huge annoyance. Bluefish has other annoyances, but these are mostly missing features that I would like to have, like the ability to reorder the tabs for open files. The file explorer seems completely broken too. I eventually installed Notepad++ in Wine. It sounds like I’m bashing Bluefish, but it’s actually the best editor for web development that I’ve found for Linux. I like gedit for editing other files, but I need a file explorer sidebar for web development.

I think what this comes down to is the number of “windows developers” versus the number of “linux developers”. Windows just has tons more people making apps than Linux. People talk a lot about the market share of linux/windows users, but I would be interested in some numbers involving the number of people who can program for Linux. Unfortunately I’m not in that second category. Mostly because I’m pretty hard against learning C++ unless it’s taught to me. C++ programming just seems like a whole lot of non-fun. I want to implement features, not debug endlessly and muck around with garbage collection. I really want to learn D, but right now it seems like the D community is geared toward attracting C and C++ programmers and not newbies developers (which, despite a few years of web development and screwing around with .NET, I still consider myself).

As far as Windows goes, I’ve really been itching to give XNA another go. I’ve sort of lost interest in making any games in XNA but I still want to mess with it. I’ve been thinking of trying my hand at making a GUI system. Or just mess around with 2D physics again. I also want to give WPF a try. From the short glance I’ve given it, I looks a bit like XNA for desktop apps. Which sounds awesome.

Wow, that was a big post.

Edit: Turns out gedit has a plugin system (cool) and there’s a file explorer plugin. I’ll have to check that out.

So yesterday my fresh Windows installation on a new hard drive started freezing on me. Not only that, but I was getting write errors. (Little yellow popup in the corner saying Windows couldn’t write something to the hard drive.) I was afraid that it was dying, especially since a lot of the reviews said things about the drive being DOA or dying shortly after installation. So, trying not to panic, I tried using different data and power cables. Which thankfully worked. But like an idiot, I switched out both at the same time so I don’t know which it was. I’m thinking it was the power cable though because it was using a whatever-to-SATA adapter, which I switched to my PSU’s only SATA power plug.

Also, the 200GB hard drive I had Linux installed on decided to jump on the death bandwagon and die too. Unlike the other hard drive that died, this one had things on it that I will miss. Although they are probably replaceable. So now I have to figure out how I want to install Linux. I’m thinking of trying out Ubuntu. I had Gentoo installed before. I like Gentoo, but it’s much better as a server than desktop because people don’t generally want to have to recompile their kernel when they decide to install a CD burner or the like. (I’m not saying it’s completely necessary, blah blah…) Some people just want it to work. And you can’t say I’m lazy cause my server runs Gentoo.