This is a follow up to a previous post where I declared my laptop free of Vista. So to finally answer your question Ryan, its going well.

I've been running Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10) for the past 6 weeks almost every day and haven't had any problems. On the contrary, my laptop is super speedy now, and for whatever reason I swear the wireless works better and faster than it ever did with Vista.

I haven't missed MS Office all that much. I primarily use Outlook in MS Office anyway, and that's not by choice, so like most everyone I use GMail when not at work. When I do need to write an actual document I've found OpenOffice and Google docs more than adequate for my meager needs. In fact Google docs has actually been preferable since some of the docs I've needed to share authorship. I will have to concede that the UI in OpenOffice leaves room for improvement. The icons are hard to see and distinguish from their standard MS Office counter parts.

I've been using Gimp for image editing because it comes preinstalled, but its a little too technical for my needs, and thus difficult to do simple things. Even Photoshop is easier to use IMO. I find Paint.Net superior for my needs so I plan on switching since it will run on Mono. In fact a lot of the winform compatibility testing for Mono has been done using Paint.NET.

I have missed Visual Studio a little, but really what I miss are my ReSharper keyboard shortcuts. I've been primarily using Eclipse since I have been primarily doing Java and Groovy programming in my laptop. Both of these dev environments were quite easy to setup, especially the Android plugin for Eclipse, it works really quite well for editing and debugging. The Grails integration into Eclipse is pretty rough, so I'm looking into buying IntelliJ IDEA since I hear it has really good Grails support.  That and I'm already familiar with the keyboard shortcuts from ReSharper. I use the IDEA shortcuts in Re# which always throws my co-workers off when they try to pair with me.

The command line has been a little tricky to get used to, but has been more consistent between commands than Windows. And the translucent terminal windows are sure purdy. Ray pointed me to a free Ubuntu pocket guide that has helped smooth things over. I now often find myself incorrectly trying to use *nix commands in my DOS prompts at work. Perhaps its time to install Cygwin to iron it the discrepancy?

Not everything has been booz and cigars though. I've had serious issues with Mono, specifically MonoDevelop. The problems of course are my own making. The version of Mono and MonoDevelop packaged with Intrepid isn't quite as new as I would like, so I decided to build my own from the SVN trunk.  That was about 4 weeks ago.  After installing and bulding another 20 prerequisite libraries I finally got MonoDevelop to not only compile and load without crashing, but I also got it to compile and run my first C# app MonoDevelop!

This one goal of getting the latest version of MonoDevelop and Mono running on my Ubuntu box has taught me more about Mono and Linux than anything else I've done.  Despite the hair pulling its been a rewarding journey. I feel like I've earned my first Linux merit badge.

See Dylan, I gots its werking without resorting to a VM and the package manager!

Today I start platform rehab, and this time I'm serious about getting clean. I'm writing this blog post from my laptop, yes my laptop, running Ubuntu 8.10. You don't get serious about dumping Windows until you take the plunge of installing Linux on your laptop. If you're like me, your laptop is your primary development box.

To my surprise, even my el-cheap-o laptop was absolutely painless to install Linux on. I suspect that maybe, just maybe, that even my 65 year old mom could do it. Even the wireless works connecting to the commuter trains free wifi. The only slightly difficult part was setting up my development environment, and that was mostly because I'm not super familiar with the OS or tooling, all of which are my problems.

Why did I switch? To people who use Linux already this is a rhetorical question, but for me the reason was pretty simple: Linux is free and good. I generally don't play games anymore, especially on my laptop. I don't really use MS Office too much, and Open Office is more than OK for my needs. Firefox is just as good on Linux as Windows.

More importantly though, Linux is the gateway to the backbone of the Internet. You don't build a web company on a proprietary per license platform when you have equivalent or better alternatives for free; after all Microsoft is dead. This speaks directly to competitive advantage and more importantly to a company's bottom line. I'm cheap. Startups, if their going to be successful, should be cheap.

Now back to GRails for me.