On and on; off and off; yet we go

One thought… Its nice to find sets of applications that work, that you can use to fulfill requirements. On the Linux side, I had my short list (which is getting shorter by the day). I wanted a nice blog client and enter JBlogEditor. I was willing to give OODraw a chance to do some basic flow modeling/charting I needed. OODraw does simple flow modeling pretty decently; but the one feature which makes it worth its incredible expense (free?), is the PDF export. Perhaps others don’t use this as often; but I tend to share documents with a variety of users on a variety of OS’es. The PDF export in OpenOffice means I can write my documents or draw my stuff and never leave the OpenOffice interface/UI to build PDF files. Very handy if you need that sort of thing. The other big thing is that OpenOffice has grown a lot and the 2.0.x release in Debian Unstable provides a great set of functionality. I just wish they would shrink the size of the UI/Menu icons. They seem rather large to me.

At work, I have two laptops actually. One is my primary work machine running Linux. The other runs Windows XP Pro. I am on the Linux laptop about 95% of the time. That’s a good thing ™. But, I don’t really mind Windows either and I have some great XP applications there. Yes, Uncle Dan, there are nice Windows applications. There are nice applications across the board actually. Some we really don’t attribute the “nice” label to but irregardless they are nice. Little guys like screen and rsync that do these tasks for me that make life more bearable. There are bigger guys too. I’ve already talked about OpenOffice; but I really like a few of the multi-platform applications like Gaim, Firefox, Thunderbird, Xchat. Gaim by itself is worth the price of admission. I can always create a nice environment with just adding a few tools. One of them is is smtp services. I just don’t get why there is no SMTP server bundled. That’s just sorry. Out of the box, no way to send mail…

So, my reasons before for using Windows have shifted to my reasons for using Linux. My job demands I use Linux these days. But I will always run Debian here. I’ve tried others and they frustrate me.