I've often wondered if I could break away from commercial operating systems (Microsoft and Apple), and successfully operate with only open source and freely available software. Recently, I came upon a second-hand computer, which afforded the opportunity to try it out without sacrificing my not-so-old Windows laptop to the effort.
The machine is a well-used laptop sporting a dual core Intel CORE i5 and 8 GB RAM. I purchased a 250 GB SSD for it and installed Ubuntu 15.10. I will disclose up front that I am very comfortable in the Linux environment, so there was no learning curve associated with the operating system. The question was whether or not the application coverage was sufficient. Let's tackle them in alphabetical order.
Browser
I use Chrome. `Nuff said.
Well, no, actually. Casting to a Chromecast doesn't work the same in Linux as it does in Windows. I can't queue YouTube videos in Linux like I can in Windows (or on Android, for that matter). Fortunately, I don't really do this much. In fact, I only started casting YouTube videos because Windows was producing audio artifacts during video playback. Casting got rid of them. So did Linux.
Documents and Presentations
Microsoft Word (and Excel, and PowerPoint) beats the pants off of LibreOffice. But then, so does Google Docs (and Sheets, and Slides). And for the stuff I'm creating, Google Docs is good enough.
Photo Editing
I put in a lot of time, sweat, and tears learning how to do things in Photoshop. I dreaded having to do the same for Gimp. It turns out, I may not have to.
LightZone seems to fill the gap nicely. And it feels pretty intuitive right off the bat. If I need layers, I can muddle my way around Gimp. Besides, with Adobe heading towards the annual subscription-based model for their products, having to learn Gimp feels like less of a deterrent. Wonder if my Wacom tablet works?
For photo organizing, I used Picasa. Picasa made organizing photos and sharing them on the Internet straightforward. It's too bad Google seems to have stopped supporting it. Fortunately, LightZone seems to reproduce much of what I used Picasa for, and Google Photo allows drag-and-drop onto the web page to create albums to share with friends (and large corporations), so Picasa's album sync isn't really necessary.
Programming
I've been programming in a Linux environment for a while now. In fact, I don't know how to do anything in Windows any more (unless it's in the Git bash shell), so this was a non-issue.
Tax Software
Um... Yeah. Hmm...
Video Editing
Making home movies is fun. In my household, they are usually some kind of stop motion creation. For really long movies, Movie Maker in Windows was found to be lacking, unable to render really long stop motion films from a myriad of stills. On my old Mac Mini, iMovie could do the job, but the newer OS X releases have effectively hobbled that machine.
A quick Internet search returned many possibilities. I'm going to try
Pitivi. If that doesn't float my boat, there are myriad others out there.
Conclusion
The most telling observation is that in the week or so that I've been using this newly instantiated Linux box, I haven't turned on the Windows machine except to grab a bookmark in the browser (I don't sync them to the cloud) that I needed to transfer over, or a file that didn't make it onto the NAS.
The only thing I do miss from the Windows box is the built-in SD card reader for importing photos. But that's a hardware, not an OS feature. I miss it enough that I'm contemplating purchasing another SSD and doing a drive swap on that machine. Then I can have two Linux laptops in my possession. (You can't have too many computers in the house. Amiright?)
Come tax season, I can always pop the Windows drive back in the computer. Think of it as an incentive to get the taxes done quickly.
