Casa Robino

…but you’ll hear them from an agnostic.

Welcome. This is your favourite mac user attempting - yet again - her switch to Linux.  This time, however, it’s serious… Somewhat serious.
It’s not a total switch I admit, but before you smack me on the face with my vicious proprietary machine working on vicious proprietary software, may I remind you I use Final Cut Pro for a living.
In the previous installment I had a go at installing Ubuntu and wrote down few initial impressions. I have since: changed my main machine to higher specs and changed my mind - I installed Mint. Call me shallow, but brown really doesn’t suit me. I now have a 120 GB partition with Mac OS, which boots by default, and a 30GB partition with Linux Mint, which boots when I feel like it and remember to press the option key. Starting up generally takes longer, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make for the sake of knowledge of no proven relevance.
There are several practical issues which you will immediately encounter once you install your Linux of choice (including the problem of the choice and instal itself, but we will get t that) in our imaginary world where you are doing that because I encouraged you. But before I get to the nitty gritty I think there are few underlining ideas that you might want to familiarize yourself with and that are not necessarily often discussed in relevant circles. First and most importantly: Linux is for the adventurous. The platform has made enormous progress over past few years, but it still is very much the wild wild west of computing.  As we know the adventurous of the original wild wild west gave the world what later became Las Vegas and Los Angeles, an for the sake of this case I hope they all retired in big fat mansions in California, laying on the side of their pools and drinking local beer - ice cold. I don’t know how historically probable it is, as a matter of fact I’m pretty sure it isn’t, but I am not the person to allow a fact stand in the way of good opinion.
Before the Hollywood, Casionos and regular Celine Dion performances the west was however a jungle and as such was for the tough ones. There was very little rule, other than social manners, who everybody saw as it suited them. So I reckoned it’s best to mention the hardest bits first; if you are an adventurer you’ll appreciate them. If not go back to the suburbs and suffer the boredom. Consider this:
Number one: The big problem of open source community that reflects on usability of its products is the disproportion between the number of progremmers and number of designers. I know of very few good interface designers - even less of programmer capable of designing good user interface. This is not because they’re badly educated or not talented - it is because, though it us often overlooked, programing and design are two different areas of knowledge, two different jobs and i bet if you asked QI they would tell you two different parts of brain are deployed to handle them. Indeed thinking in terms of good design is sometimes contradictory in its principles to thinking in terms of good code. To put very simply programmers think in commands and designers think in menus (by menus I mean not the list of options, but the logics of graphic layout). You will often see open source applications (including web ones) where menus are the literal graphic version of commands. This, for most of humanity, is not going to work. People are used to use computers with menus. And if they are to use commands the command need to make sense in terms of usual language (see ubiquity for an example). Contrary to what seems to be a popular belief among programmers, design is not only aesthetics - its where the usability for a non-geeky person is.
Number two: no matter what they tell you, if you are switching to Linux from other system, it is not good to use out of the box. You will spend some amount of time setting it up and getting it to work, and that is probably mainly due to the fact that you already have your own little ways of doing things and long cultivated habits. It will, for a while, feel like moving in with some one, after you lived on your own for several years. They change your TV channels, they move stuff around in the fridge and you have to wait till they get out of the bathroom. But hey, it’s a bit more fun with company and chances are they will also buy bread and beer when you’ll need it most.
Which leads us to number three: you will need a Linux-literate friend to help you out. And that is probably the very reason for which I would advice it to brand fresh and new computer users; these friends are easy to find. The immediacy of help you will get with your Linux issues is not comparable to anything else. There are always forums, FAQs, wikis, all put together by enthusiasts, but most of all you can always catch some one online who will help you out. Make some friends on identi.ca - or if microblogging is not your thing try forums like these over at LinuxOutlaws.com.
You will often hear that Linux and open source software in general is about freedom of choice and its main advantage is that once can make it whatever they want it to be. That is not strictly true, mainly because most people don’t have the knowledge which is necessary and resources (time, energy) to get the knowledge. The advantages of Linux to a normal user are different than to a user-developer. First and foremost it’s cheap - or for free. Therefore if you are buying a machine with Linux it will come with pretty much everything you might need (except decent video editing software, but that’s a whole other story).  Secondly you will learn a lot out of sheer curiosity. You might not want to go into configuring it and designing it according to your own wishes, but every now and then something will interest you - and as I said if you ask you won’t wait long.
Here we arrive at the fourth and final point: beware extremists on all sides (and occasions, really). As it happens with the wild wild west things tend to get fiery rather easily with some of the open source folk. Any form of compromise tends to equate to either total lack of freedom or betrayal (think Rorschach from Watchmen) of sorts. This in turn limits not only possibility of discussion but the entire enterprise. But that is a whole other story. In general, these are some of the most dedicated and idealistic people you will ever meat and although your attachment to your Apple Mac will make their blood boil they drink beer just as we do. And Russians love their children too.