More on Linux (so okay, not strictly relevant to outlining - perhaps)

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 29, 2013 at 11:03 PM

As I watch the way the Big Boys are fiddling about with their operating systems, I find myself feeling more and more bemused - and irritable.

The sheer messiness of Windows 8, and the lack of care behind MacOS X (best described here: http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2013/20130123_1-Apple-core-rot.html), are making me feel very glum about the future of mainstream computing generally. Silly, perhaps - but when multibillion-dollar companies can do such extraordinary things to the systems we all depend on for our daily bread, you can - maybe - see my point.

So it was with great pleasure that I recently installed the latest version of Xubuntu (12.10) on a rather nice Asus 1101 netbook I’ve had for a couple of years. Despite 2GB of RAM, the latter has limped along with Windows XP aboard; despite cleaning it down regularly, the machine didn’t boot in less than ca. 8 minutes - ridiculous!

So I installed JoliOS alongside it, which did indeed run nice and quickly but wasn’t actually very practical. Realising I was rarely using the machine, I bit the bullet, wiped the entire hard drive and replaced both Windows and JoliOS with Xubuntu. And lo! I now have a nice, speedy little netbook with an operating system that is actually pretty much state-of-the-art. It boots in around 40 seconds, runs very quickly, loads e.g. LibreOffice, Basket NotePads (despite the latter’s KDE libraries), Google Chrome, Thunderbird very fast, runs Dropbox, and links very nicely to my local WebDAV servers. What a little gem!

The front end looks like a very pleasant mixture of Windows and Mac, with the equivalent of a ‘Start’ menu but also a (usually off-screen) launcher. And with an eminently sensible three-workspace component on the toolbar so you can switch between 3 (or fewer, or more, if you prefer) virtual desktops. Suddenly it’s a highly usable machine again. And I’m rediscovering all sorts of nice outliner and information management progs in Linux-land that I’d more or less lost touch with.

There are some interesting shortcomings: there’s no Google Drive or SkyDrive clients (although there are workarounds for both). OneNote is a bit of a non-starter (hence Basket NotePads, which is not OneNote-compatible, alas). On the other hand KeepNote runs very nicely in native mode, as do TomBoy and a variety of other cross-platform offerings. I’ve also got ProjectForum running in the background (with no noticeable impact on performance) as a kind of personal wiki (although PF is actually more powerful than that, being a complete collaborative platform).

If you’ve got an older machine sitting around, it’s worth taking a good look at a lightweight offering like Xubuntu. I recently gave my daughter’s boyfriend a very elderly HP notebook (dating from 2000!) with Xubuntu installed on it - it runs like a dream. And Linux applications have been maturing at an impressive rate. LibreOffice alone is spectacularly good.

And just to keep this topic very vaguely relevant to the forum, you might want to check out the very pleasant CherryTree, which is a cross-platform dual-pane outliner.