Acorns

A couple months ago, my wife and I began a project to upgade her old PC, which ran Windows 98, to a newer used laptop running Linux. Our goals were more responsiveness and better compatibility between our data, like address books and calendars.

Switching to Linux was no small feat, especially because my wife is not a programmer, or even a Linux hobbyist. She just wants a working computer to use the Internet.

The laptop came from someone on Cornell's Student Linux Users Group. It's a Tadpole Talin 15. Tadpole is a small brand based near us, specializing in Unix notebooks. It came with Sun Java Desktop, but I found that to be too closed and restrictive.

After trying Debian Sarge, my Linux distribution of choice, we settled on OpenSUSE, on which Sun Java Desktop is based, for its user-friendliness. It just seems better targetted at non-programmers,a and also a little more up to date for someone who doesn't want excuses about bugs in Debian's "testing" or "unstable" distros but does appreciate the difference between KDE 3.3 and 3.4.

So far I've been pleased, and so has my wife. KDE's Kontact, including KCalendar, KMail, and KAddressBook, are serving us well. We use the OpenOffice.org suite of office tools, especially for spreadsheets. I login to the new laptop from an X session on my old computer, and we share the 2.4 GHz CPU and 0.5 GB RAM. Performance is good, except for IMAP email access. IMAP is hosted by my old computer and required an easy switch from mbox to mbx file format for acceptable performance in Kmail. We share our contacts and calendar, and have set the system up so that files we create are accessible to both of us by default (with umask 002 and a common default group). My wife has discovered the power of Craigslist RSS feeds with Akregator.

Some people say Linux is not ready for the desktop, and I will concede, there are some missing pieces. GnuCash, our replacement for Microsoft Money, lacks budgetting. We've resorted to a spreadsheet which has worked surprisingly well. My wife misses the printer options we previously had under HP's bloated Windows driver, but we do have the basic draft, normal, and photo quality options. And some things just plain don't work seamlessly. For example, to do our taxes on the Web last weekend, we had to use FireFox instead of the usual Konqueror, for JavaScript compatibility, but FireFox couldn't load PDFs out-of-the-box to print our tax return. We had to use Tools -> Page Info -> Media -> Save As.

On the brighter side, we get the perks of Linux. Although a few KDE apps have crashed on occasion, Linux itself has not. We get frequent software updates, thanks to the SUSE Watcher, which rarely require a reboot. We can customize things in ways that Microsoft products just presume you would never want. And we get a clear conscience for supporting open standards and interoperability -- the corner stones of American democracy (well, the Internet, anyway) you learn about in sixth-grade social studies.

We're not quite done switching to Linux for home computing, but we're almost there. We haven't used the old Windows PC in a few weeks and are nearly ready to shut it down for good.