Cracking Up for Sanity
My sense of the world has been fracturing in interesting ways during these cold days, and I've been abhorring my discursive mind. The endless web work, late nights, and snowstorms have finally pushed me to the brink, and only a return to my artistic roots will suffice. So tonight I carried a big old table up the stairs to my room, where it will serve as my recording studio for the winter. I'm in no mood to record old material – I just want to experiment and play and see what happens.
Ubuntu In the Mix
I'm having a ball with Ubuntu Desktop, a popular distribution of Linux. I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a Core 2 Duo MacBook about a week ago as a secondary OS and so far I'm very impressed. The window manager "Compiz Fusion" deserves special mention. It uses OpenGL 3D graphics effects for window animation, workspace and application switching, object selection, etc., and some of these effects are pretty amazing. (I genuinely miss "wobbly windows" when using other systems now.) There are plugins that work like Spaces and Exposé in Mac OS X, of course, but Compiz takes the concept of a virtual space to a higher level. The Desktop Cube with 3D Windows is not only impressive but really useful for visualizing the whole workspace at a higher level. And if that's not your taste, endless varieties of switchers are possible. Personally I'm holding out for a desktop where my inactive windows are at the bottom of a swimming pool.
As a working environment I consider Ubuntu a better desktop OS by a wide margin than Windows XP (as anything in 2011 ought to be). I hesitate to call Ubuntu better than Windows 7 because Windows is a very rich and well-established desktop environment with a lot of polish. The desktop environment of Ubuntu (Gnome/Compiz) still feels pretty rickety by comparison, in spite of some really cool, flashy, and even useful features. There are many Linux apps that are as functional and stable as their Windows and Mac OS X counterparts, yet in spite of their individual quality, the poor aesthetics and usability of Linux window managers just makes them seem less trustworthy. What's needed is a series of "sprints" where developers get together to bring consistency, usability, and beauty to user interfaces across several apps.
So, how does Ubuntu compare with Mac OS X? Well, I'm a power user of Mac OS X and a Mac developer, so (as you might imagine) I consider Mac OS X to be the most rich, usable, robust, and polished desktop OS on the planet, and I tend to find useful the new features Apple adds in each release.
That said, as a desktop environment Gnome/Compiz only falls short in a few areas compared to Mac OS X...
1. I find myself missing the system-wide Spotlight search a lot. I have a lot of content, and although it's well-organized it can be a real hassle to navigate to folders I haven't used in a while and pick out the document I want. With Spotlight, every document is indexed and I can instantly find everything related to "hot peppers" on my system. Nothing available on Linux has all the powers of Spotlight, but Google Desktop fills much of that niche and I intend to install it soon.
2. The promise of GNU/Linux is that we can build any system we want to suit any preferences and any hardware. Well in my Linux I'd like a proper command key rather than needing to use the control key for menu shortcuts. A command key just makes more sense in a windowed environment. The control key has special meaning in Terminal, Emacs, and elsewhere, and using it for the menu system – especially in a Linux environment – only complicates things. (It wasn't a good idea when Microsoft did it either.) In Linux the command key is called the super or meta key, and out of the box it's used for some of Compiz's special effects. But there's just no simple way to make Command the master modifier for Gnome's menus. Others have undoubtedly come across these issues and found some ways to deal with some of them, so I'll keep googling.
3. Column view. I'm told there are file browsers that have it. But I like the default file browser a lot, and would love to have a column view option. Why it's not there already I'm not sure. It may be that adding it would make the browser too close to Mac OS X, which intellectual property is guarded by many lawyers. But cascading columns were in file browsers long before Mac OS X came along, and with good reason. They're really usable. I can live without Cover Flow, but I need my columns. I'll be exploring add-on options soon and will report back.
4. Keyboard selection in lists and menus. When you pop open a menu in Mac OS X or Windows you can type a few letters and the most nearly-matching item will be highlighted. This is so useful it should be mandatory. Ubuntu has accessibility as one of its aims, so maybe this feature would clash with the way menu accessibility works. Who knows? Anyhow, I really miss this feature, so it's another thing I'll be hunting down.
5. The default music app included with Ubuntu is RhythmBox, and unfortunately the current version is unstable, dog ugly, and lacking in features (including some of the sort which could easily be added in a weekend). What I really want is iTunes, which is just a great, solid, and powerful all-in-one media library app. There's no reason in 2011 why there shouldn't be a kick-ass media library manager / player in Linux. Someone must be obsessed with such a project, right? Once again, googling...!
But Will It Blend?
All these gripes aside, the main issue is, can I actually get real work done using a Linux desktop system in 2011? I've decided to find out, and audio production is my chosen testing ground. I expect to discover a whole slew of new and interesting software to make, record, edit, and mix audio. Linux is very popular in creative college environments and among math and audio geeks, and there's a lot of really cool stuff out there. Some of it is good enough (Audacity) to have made the crossover to popularity in Mac OS X and Windows.
The next step is to download a bunch of tools and immediately start making tracks, endless tracks...
