Am I insane? Pondering switch away from Windows

I'll be getting a new machine at work soon as a result of a "N-year old machines are automatically upgraded" policy we have here. So, I've been thinking a lot lately about what to get next.

Thought 0: the latest Dell Dimension boxes may not have Athlons, which is annoying, but they are insanely fast, and more importantly, they're dead silent. I could run Windows (either 2000 or XP, not sure on that yet), and continue doing what I'm doing now, which includes running Linux under VMware, and displaying my apps with XWin32.

The problem with this Win2K/VMware/Linux mess is that nothing is ever quite right. The virtual desktop manager I'm running (SDesk) works well but not quite well enough. Likewise, cygwin makes it feel almost Unix-like, but not quite. Likewise, cut-and-paste from X to Windows and back occasionally flakes out and I have to restart the X server. This is annoying.

Thought 1: I've been thinking for a while about switching to Linux. The applications that I use regularly are all there except for Microsoft Office, Quicken, and (occasionally) TurboTax. All the software I ever write is in Java, which has perfectly acceptable Linux support. I could run VMware the other way around (Win2000 on VMware on Linux), I suppose, but that doesn't seem right somehow (Linux can run quite happily on a small VMware environment, with no X server, etc., whereas Win2000 is a pig and would require a huge VMware environment).

Thought 2:You've seen them. The smiling, smug Macintosh bigots. They get real Unix, they can compile all those X apps and run them natively. They also get native Mac applications and real Microsoft Word (which they'll claim is better than the versions that ship for Microsoft's own operating systems). Heck, I'd even get to run real Quicken.

So, I've been racking my brains to answer the question: exactly which things, that I'm utterly dependent on now, would potentially break if I switched away from running Windows altogether (i.e., going pure Linux or going to MaxOS X). The tricky bits seem to be:

- Microsoft Outlook: I don't use it for e-mail, but I'm hooked on it for my to-do list, contact list, and calendar. Furthermore, it happily synchronizes with my Ericsson T39. Despite the fact that the phone speaks SyncML, and there are SyncML toolkits everywhere, I haven't seen any other applications / plug-ins that claim to support my phone. If I get Office for Mac, then I get all the contact management stuff, but I don't get the phone synchronization.

- emplode (I haven't tried jemplode yet, though)
- MP3 Tag Studio (are there Mac or Linux tools that come close to this thing?)
- EAC (Linux has grip, which rocks, but is iTunes on the Mac as good?)

- Quicken / TurboTax: these are available for MacOS, but not Linux

- Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint: Again, the Mac seems to solve the problem, but Linux isn't quite there yet (OpenOffice, from what I can tell, needs another year or two of work)



So, thinking this all the way through, Apple starts looking good. Really good. They still have the stupid one-button mouse, and Apple inexpicably refuses to make a sub-four-pound notebook. Still, the Apple fantasy has a grip on me. Am I crazy? Will I be pissed that Apple has this weird DVD-R drive when other folks seem to be going to DVD+RW? Is there something else missing that I'm forgetting?

You are the poster boy for why most of corporate America still uses Windows. Your dilemna is everyone's dilemna.

I say do whatever you can do wean yourself from Windows, even if it means making a huge pig VMware environment in which to run a Windows copy just for those few programs which don't have a Linux equivalent.

The Macintosh path is nice. I'm considering it myself, I'd have to give it a few years to mature though.

As for Linux and Microsoft Office: have you considered Crossover Office from the makers of Wine?

Calvin

Try StarOffice for Linux. Compatible with Microsoft Office Files. Soon to release Version 6 which is just no coming our of Beta. Versions for Windows as well.

I've though about Crossover Office. The review I read said, in essence, "wow, it works, except for where it doesn't work." Office isn't a toy for me. It's something I need to do my job. I want to run a supported environment. Crossover Office smells like something Microsoft will go out of its way to kill (and, even if not that, it's certainly not something Microsoft will be testing against, and would never certify as a supported platform). I'd much rather do VMware, even though I loose things like cut-and-paste.

I've also thought about Star Office. Maybe the new version from Sun is better than one I played with last year. Again, this isn't a toy for me. PowerPoint is fundamental to my job. Can I develop a file with Star Office and deploy it on PowerPoint 2000? Vice versa? Do all the animations work? I'm sorely tempted to move to PowerPoint XP for its (finally!) revamped animation interface. Is there anything close for other platforms?

This is why the Mac route seems so attractive. Now if only they can solve the synchronization problem. This smells like something Apple should make as an O.S. service that other applications can plug into.

*sigh*

I'm going to assume that this machine is totally for work and ignore stuff like games and whatnot.

VMWare: I've run a lot of Windows as VMWare under Linux, mostly 98 and 2k, IIRC. I've run them both at the same time and they still work marvelously. I've never had many (if any) issues with the copy and paste, as it just seems to work after you install the VMWare drivers in the guest OS, and they don't really suck up that many resources; just make sure you've got a good amount of memory.

Macintosh: MacOS X does not have a built-in X server. There are third party ones available, but they're likely to be as flaky as XWin32, though you would have compiling support. Even though MS Office is available for MacOS and MacOS X, I still try to avoid them. Even so, I got the demo version of Office v.X just to see and it seems very nice. But it still costs about $450 when I can get AppleWorks, for example, for $80 (not that I've used it).

I don't know anything about Outlook's todo lists, honestly. But you might want to take a look at Evolution for Linux. It seems to work pretty well for that sort of stuff. Office v.X has ``Entourage'', which seems to be a step beyond Outlook.

jEmplode works very well, not quite as rock solid as emplode, but close enough. Under Linux, I don't believe there's any drag and drop support, though. There are a number of mp3 tag editors for Unix, some nice, some not so. I'm trying to come up with one particularly nice one now, but I'm drawing a blank on its name for some reason.

I personally don't like iTunes. By default, it keeps everything in what we call a soup mode, and it doesn't understand articles, so ``The Who'' is under the `T's. You can create playlists, but you have to do it manually. No drag and drop, AFAICS, as that just puts the files in the soup mode. You also can't just play a tune without it adding it to its soup, which is especially annoying for clips from CDNow, for example. I do like the fact that it doesn't support skins, but that's just my asinine prejudice.

There are a couple of financial apps for Linux, which might work fine for you, depending on exactly what you do with Quicken. GnuCash and Moneydance are the ones that comes to mind.

You can still purchase a multi-button mouse for your Mac. And Apple laptops, while heavy, are remarkable. None of those weird problems you get with Wintel laptops. Don't know anything about writable DVDs, though.

If I were you, I'd go with Linux, if you're comfortable there, and run VMWare if you require some Windows application. VMWare really does work very well under Linux. Perhaps better than under Windows. Macs are also very nice and would tend to have a little more application support than Linux. You can also get VirtualPC, which runs quite well, too, though not as well as VMWare does (but better, really, when you consider that it's actually emulating to some extent and not just virtualizing the CPU). I've considered in the past setting up Windows in VMWare and making it a nonpersistent disk after installing all the appropriate software and saving all data to a network drive. That way, your installation will never get corrupted.

Regardless, you'll be better off than with a Windows machine as it won't start to break down in 6 months.

Quicken / TurboTax: these are available for MacOS, but not Linux

If you have all of your previous year Turbo Tax returns and Quicken data saved in your computer now, will you be able to access that data if you change platforms?

tanstaafl.

I decided last year to begin a migration to Mac OS X, and right now I am in the middle of it. So far, so good. I started by grabbing a cheep iMac to see what I could do with Mac OS X. I have since bought a G4 Cube as a desktop, and in August, will be grabbing a TiBook.

First, the mouse comment. Yes Macs ship with a single button mouse, but I currently use a Logitech trackball, and with no drivers ever installed, I get "context" menus when I right click, and the scroll wheel works everywhere. I didn't even think about it much until I booted into OS 9 and lost all that functionality.

Microsoft Office seems nice, and will be there when I need it. It does seem to be a bit different then the PC version, but is probably on par with XP for all the features and such. And the nice bonus feature, complements of the OS, is the ability to generate a PDF. That has been useful on several occasions.

I haven't played with X yet, but I understand XonX makes it pretty easy to deal with. Since more and more distros are putting out PPC versions, software shouldn't be too much of a problem either.

iTunes seems to be one of the nicer media managment programs out there, but I don't like a manager program. So far I've ripped a few CDs to have in it's library, but it's been used most as an internet radio player. If I could figure out a way to embed lame into it, I'd be happy enough to use it. For now, I'll probably rip on my PC with AudioGrabber until I find a solution.

jemplode works very well on Mac OS X, and should serve as a great replacement to emplode.

Definitly look into Virtual PC though, it will be nice to have just in case. Also, don't forget a USB to Serial converter for upgrades.

Will I be pissed that Apple has this weird DVD-R drive when other folks seem to be going to DVD+RW?

Not really, all the hype around DVD+RW is just that. DVD-R is a solution that works now, and works well. DVD+RW on the other hand dosen't have the excellent compatibility, nor the ease of upgrading firmware that everyone expected to get DVD+R support. So you are stuck with expensive RW disks, and have to wait on a manufacturer to decide to recall every DVD+RW drive to send out DVD+R/DVD+RW drives. Enough manufactueres beyond Apple have shipped DVD-R drives, so it's not going to just fade away.

Here is another thought...I just did this at home and it is working quite well. I have Win2000 Pro, which is nice and stable. I then put Cygwin on my machine. Tons of stuff has been ported to Cygwin, like KDE, Gnome, gimp, Perl, CVS etc. I have ssh running, Apache, Perl, etc. It is great. I get to use all the Windows programs I like, and when I need something Unix style, I just launch a Cygwin shell and go to work. I have set-up shortcuts on my desktop to lauch rxvt terminals, an Xserver interface, KDE...the possibities are relly endless.

I have started to do the same with my work machine, and since Xfree86 has been ported to Cygwin, I was able to dump Xwin32. The installation is pretty painless.

I'm running cygwin, and it's definitely one of the rquired things to makes Win2K usable. Somehow, though, it's not the same. I just really want to dump Win2K altogether. I'm sick of the random inexplicable crashes. I'm sick of one program slamming the CPU and all the others being unresponsive. (I'm particularly sick of Canon's ImageBrowser software which reprioritizes itself to be "Above Normal", which especially kills system response time.) It's time to use a real OS. It's just those damn applications...

(Favorite recent example of an inexplicable crash: In the background, my home machine was grinding away running Lame to make some MP3 files, under the control of EAC. Meanwhile, I'm working in PowerPoint. Three minutes into dorking with PowerPoint, *boom*, blue screen of death and reboot before I can read the text. Get everything back up again, restart EAC, restart PowerPoint, and three minutes later, *boom*. Next time, I forgot about EAC and just ran PowerPoint and it all worked fine. Note that EAC was done ripping. It was just running Lame in the background. If an OS isn't stable enough to handle a single heavy CPU load plus interactive apps, then something's wrong.)

I've been getting a lot more blue screens lately. Whereas before my system was stable for months, now it crashes several times a month. All this after various microsoft security updates.

Calvin

My Windows 2000 system got a lot more stable and had a lot fewer blue-screens after I scoured it clean of adware and spyware using Lavasoft's "Ad-Aware". One particularly nasty one was Cydoor's "CD_Load". You might want to try that.

I've got some crap called "Savenow.exe" constantly taking up memory on my machine. It got up to 43MB recently and slowed my machine to a halt.

Does that Adaware program have to run continuously in order to work correctly?

no, you run it when necessary to get rid of junk like that.

Yeah, the CyDoor thing got me after I installed that MP3 tag editor. My hard disk would be grinding away at night for no aparent reason. No, the instability with my system seems to occur consistently when you've got an interactive app competing with a purely CPU bound job. That sort of bug is strictly embarassing for Microsoft.

Yes, Ad-aware will remove the awful "savenow" program from your system. Ad-aware is a one-shot cleaning utility that does not stay resident in memory. You just run it every once in a while to scour your system of adware/spyware. I swear by it.

I just wanted to say THANK YOU for the sdesk link! I've tried
about 5-6 different virtual desktop apps for Windows and all of them sucked ass. This is great, thank you!

Oh, and why not just run 2 machines?

I don't think my instability is related to adware. I can consistently crash Windows XP by switching to another user, and then switching back. It blue screens with "INVALID_KERNEL_HANDLE" ??????? I have no idea where to begin to fix something like this. It doesn't state any device drivers, or any clue as to what caused the problem. :-(

Calvin

Windows XP is your problem...XP sucks ass.

Canon's software sucks. I have an EOS D30 and I've stopped using their software because it is just terrible. Get Breeze Browser.

In reply to:

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(I'm particularly sick of Canon's ImageBrowser software which reprioritizes itself to be "Above Normal", which especially kills

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Gee, that's the answer to all my problems. Thanks for being so helpful.

Calvin

Bringing this topic back to the top again because I now have to make a decision very soon on this.

In terms of Mac migration, I've realized I have another sticking point beyond the synchronization issue for my cel phone. I have six years of calendar data and nearly 1000 contacts in Microsoft Outlook. I don't want to loose that. As far as I can tell, there's no migration path to get that data into Entourage.

The hair-brained idea that's bouncing around here is that they've got some sort of a Windows Terminal Server which can apparently speak to an X server. So, maybe I could run Outlook over there. Anybody ever played with something like this? How hard would it be to rig a "virtual serial port" device over there to the physical serial port on my new machine (Mac, PC, or whatever)? If I could do that, I'd solve the Outlook problem, the cel phone problem, and I could switch over to a Mac now.

Thoughts?

If you're going to "drop the bitch and make the switch", I'd say do whatever you can, even if it means exporting the contact list as an ASCII file and cut/pasting it into the new app. Sure, it's a pain, but I totally support your desire to leave Microsoft behind (I'm about to post an XP rant in another thread).

Besides, it'll give you a chance to go through the list and clean it up.

There's no import function in Entourage? I know Outlook (2000) can export .csv, .dbs, .xls, .mdb, FoxPro, and .tab formats. You can also change the field 'mapping' during the output. Not as useful as your new program simply reading the .pst file (where everything in outlook is stored), but perhaps useful. As for Outlook as an Exchange client, I have no idea, but Outlook as a standalone is not bad at exporting.

-Zeke

Is the new UI really of no issue to you? I would have worlds of difficulty switching to the MacOS after all these years of Windows using. I mean, it is your work after all. I just hope the learning curve won't interfere!

Anyway, I just can't switch and I have no reason whatsoever to do so, but if you feel that strongly about it, go ahead! I just feel the opposite of Tony. But then again, I'm not as advanced a user as many of you guys, so my requirements are definitely different.

As far as I can tell, there's no migration path to get that data into Entourage.

I'll play around with this when I get home, and see what Entourage does support.

The new UI is always an issue, but it's a minor one. Every six months or so, I try all the different IMAP clients to see if there's anything better than Mozilla (and, so far, I always end up back with Mozilla). Figuring out how some new thing works isn't that bad, particularly if the software was well designed.

No, the real issue for me is simply having all the required functionality and having it all genuinely work. Switching MS Office on Win2000 to MS Office on OS X won't be a big deal. I'll probably keep running Mozilla as my e-mail client, although I'll play with Entourage. The only real thorn in my side is synchronizing to my damn cel phone.

A quick look through the Entourage menus doesn't list Outlook as an import option. Contacts and email wouldn't be a problem. Calendar entries would be though.

BTW, Outlook for Mac is an OS9 app and I don't believe it supports non-Exchange accouts. Could be wrong though.

If you're going to be using Virrtual PC, it may be worth using Outlook in that for old data and switching to a more open format for your new data.

Also give Apple's Mail client some consideration. It is just a basic mail client with no fancy extras and can be a little slow sometimes, but it was enough to make me switch from entourage, which if you don't use the PIM features, is a little bloated.

The current solution that I'm still investigating is running Outlook on a separate Windows Terminal Server box, displaying on the new machine. That would let me keep my calendaring in Outlook, but do everything else natively. Hmm...

Both VirtualPC (for MacOS and MacOS X) and VMWare (for Linux) (I mention both, just in case) are excellent products. I doubt you would have any problems using either of them.

Okay, bumping this thread to the top as I've done more research.

I'm leaning more strongly toward an OS X PowerMac, so I've been doing more research on the various sticking points. A lot of my pain comes down to my cursed Ericsson T39 phone. If I'd gotten one of those PalmPilot phones, this wouldn't be a problem. But it is.

My cel phone speaks SyncML, for which the only synchronization solution today works with Outlook on Windows. (There are numerous SyncML libraries out there, including one in Java, but nothing that's integrated into PIM software.) Now, there are two ways to talk to the phone: serial or Bluetooth. To do either on the PowerMac, you have to have a USB adapter. So, then the issue is how to rig this all the way through to VirtualPC. According to the vendor's web site, you can choose USB devices to "unplug" from the Mac and then plug into the VirtualPC.

The current question: USB serial or USB Bluetooth? I'd prefer Bluetooth for its speed, but good luck finding a Bluetooth device with drivers for both Windows and OS X. The nifty D-Link gizmo that Apple is promoting has no Windows drivers. Okay, so that means I have to go serial, right? There are a bunch of USB serial port adapters although the coolest one seems to be this one from USBgear, which also has PS/2 ports so I can use my Kinesis keyboard.

The other thought I've been pondering is perhaps getting (yet another) new cel phone. The required features for me are global GSM, some kind of PIM functionality with synchronization, and light weight. The reason I didn't get the Kyocera or Handspring phones in the first place is that they're monsters. The T39 is only 86 grams. A Handspring Trio is nearly twice that: 147 grams.

What about the Samung I300? Ok, it's no lightweight, but I like it.

Calvin

Just browsing random searches and thought i'd make a couple comments on this one.

Overall my preference would be Linux. For the office suite I think Star Office would suit just fine. And just recently I have found a great alternative to M$ Outlook. Redhat 7.3 comes with Evolution. Looks and feels like Outlook, has more features, integrates with M$ Exchange server and i'm pretty sure it can import all sorts of thins including contacts/calander.

I noticed also you said you were using EAC to encode/rip mp3's. I used to use that and had problems here and there similar to yours. I switched to dbpoweramp and am loving it. I use the LAME codec and have had no problems at all. Anyone else have any input to the comparison to these 2 encoders/rippers?

Well, as long as you bumped the thread, here's what I ended up doing.

Work: I'm getting a new PC, but it's going to be running WinXP and Linux-on-VMware, as I'm doing now. I'm just not satisfied with the other solutions for my needs at work.

At home, however, I've just taken delivery of a shiny new PowerMac.

My needs in each location are sufficiently different that I've decided to split things in half. Also, this gives me the PowerMac to play with over time, rather than trying to migrate everything at once. Two years from now, my situation will, no doubt, be different than it is today, and I might convert everything to Apple gear.

Oh, and to further confuse myself, I'm getting Apple-brand flat-screen monitors for both new computers. The educational discount makes them much better than anything else I can get.

Which display did you get?

I'm getting 23" Apple HD Cinema Displays for both the Dell and Apple machines. Luckily, us academics get a below-market price. The first monitor has already arrived and it's just astonishingly beautiful. The second monitor, strangely, isn't here yet. I tend to upgrade monitors much less frequently than I upgrade computers, so I can rationalize to myself (and my research budget) that I'll be keeping these for a while...

mmm 23" Apple HD Cinema Displays.....