10-01-2018, 09:20 PM
I have been using LL for the last week as my main computer for internet access, general note taking, music organizing, and also to a lesser degree, practicing music. I am a long time Mac user who also has a Windows PC here that I do the real music production and graphics stuff on. I put LL on my old Windows desktop computer, which was made in 2009 and only has an e5300 in it; not very fast by today's standards. I actually got a much newer PC last month so I installed all my music stuff (man, I hate messing with Windows - I mean, I REALLY hate it) and then used this older one to replace my ancient Mac (2005) which has been my main computer for a heck of a long time. I've had Macs all the way back to System 7, if you know what that means.
Anyway, although I have had some hiccups (this is my first time using Linux seriously), I really enjoy using the computer with LL on it, especially for browsing. It is much faster feeling with this OS than it was with Windows 7, of course. In some ways I still prefer the Mac but Apple has changed so much since they made my old Mac G5s (and G4s, and G3s, and the others before that) that I won't ever buy another one. However, I must say that the Mac "window manager" (it's built in to the OS, and doesn't really have a name) is much more useful in some ways than anything I have seen in Linux yet - this is due to its ability to display a hierarchical view in a way that is totally unlike the way Linux does it. If you just want a window with icons in it, then Linux is just as good, or if you want a file list sorted by date, name, whatever, then Linux is also just as good. But all I have seen so far on the various Linuxes for hierarchical views is essentially a dropdown tree, which isn't very useful. So that's the big difference I see where the Mac OS is clearly better for me.
But I have to weigh that against all the other areas where Linux is as good or better than the Mac. I will get used to the lack of a hierarchical window structure like the one I was used to. I have found applications that do most of what I need, although of course sometimes I have to learn a new way of doing things. And best of all, I'm not using proprietary Mac stuff or (ugh) Windows stuff here. I would love it if I could transition totally to Linux, but at this point it's not possible because I need my $$$ collection of VST plugins for my sequencer (Reaper, which runs pretty well in Linux as a beta, BTW) on the Windows PC, and I need to be able to use Photoshop for all the graphics work I do. Gimp is not a satisfactory replacement, as capable as it is in many ways, if only because of all the third-party Photoshop plugins I have which are not available for Gimp.
We also put Lubuntu on my wife's old netbook which simply couldn't cope with the internet any more, Firefox has gotten so big. I wiped Windows XP and put Lubuntu on it and suddenly she can use Firefox again even though she only has 1G ram on the little netbook. I probably would be using Lubuntu myself now except that I had some things which just didn't seem to work right with it (couldn't get Libre Office to run at all on any of three computers under Lubuntu, for example), so I tried Linux Lite and it just seemed to work.
So thanks to those of you who have helped me with my questions; I appreciate the assistance, and I'm sure I'll be asking them for some time to come.
Anyway, although I have had some hiccups (this is my first time using Linux seriously), I really enjoy using the computer with LL on it, especially for browsing. It is much faster feeling with this OS than it was with Windows 7, of course. In some ways I still prefer the Mac but Apple has changed so much since they made my old Mac G5s (and G4s, and G3s, and the others before that) that I won't ever buy another one. However, I must say that the Mac "window manager" (it's built in to the OS, and doesn't really have a name) is much more useful in some ways than anything I have seen in Linux yet - this is due to its ability to display a hierarchical view in a way that is totally unlike the way Linux does it. If you just want a window with icons in it, then Linux is just as good, or if you want a file list sorted by date, name, whatever, then Linux is also just as good. But all I have seen so far on the various Linuxes for hierarchical views is essentially a dropdown tree, which isn't very useful. So that's the big difference I see where the Mac OS is clearly better for me.
But I have to weigh that against all the other areas where Linux is as good or better than the Mac. I will get used to the lack of a hierarchical window structure like the one I was used to. I have found applications that do most of what I need, although of course sometimes I have to learn a new way of doing things. And best of all, I'm not using proprietary Mac stuff or (ugh) Windows stuff here. I would love it if I could transition totally to Linux, but at this point it's not possible because I need my $$$ collection of VST plugins for my sequencer (Reaper, which runs pretty well in Linux as a beta, BTW) on the Windows PC, and I need to be able to use Photoshop for all the graphics work I do. Gimp is not a satisfactory replacement, as capable as it is in many ways, if only because of all the third-party Photoshop plugins I have which are not available for Gimp.
We also put Lubuntu on my wife's old netbook which simply couldn't cope with the internet any more, Firefox has gotten so big. I wiped Windows XP and put Lubuntu on it and suddenly she can use Firefox again even though she only has 1G ram on the little netbook. I probably would be using Lubuntu myself now except that I had some things which just didn't seem to work right with it (couldn't get Libre Office to run at all on any of three computers under Lubuntu, for example), so I tried Linux Lite and it just seemed to work.
So thanks to those of you who have helped me with my questions; I appreciate the assistance, and I'm sure I'll be asking them for some time to come.
