DK Media Productions

If you’ve read the post over at Naked Linux, you know that I mostly do my work in Windows now. It’s been almost two weeks with only Windows XP on my laptop and I decided to sit down and think if I wanted to dual boot again. The short answer is no. The long answer is this…

Besides the fun of tinkering with a OS that gives you almost limitless choice on how you want to run things (to the point that it will no longer work in some cases) and the sense of giving the finger to Microsoft, there is extremely little that Linux offers that I can’t do in Windows. Not only that, but dual booting is extremely annoying for me. There’s just too much I do in Windows that switching between the two breaks the flow of work and costs time. Time that I don’t have to spare.

All work for the CGA Radio podcast and CGA Video Reviews is done in Windows. Linux audio as a majority sucks, plain and simple. It’s one of Linux’s acknowledged problems. Audacity constantly crashes and won’t let me edit the way I want to.  For those that ask “why not Ardour?”, I say Ardour is like using Pro Tools for a podcast. Sure you can do it, but the word massive overkill comes to mind. Plus for the non audio engineer it’s just not user friendly. I use Camtasia Studio for the screen capture and video editing for the CGA Video Reviews (although that will be changing soon). It allow me to do the work fast and exactly how I want it. Exporting into the different formats and sizes that I need is also easy. Now Linux does have decent (although far from perfect) screen recording programs but the only real editor, Cinelerra, is clumsy and doesn’t do what I want it to.

Gaming is terrible on Linux as well. Sure, there are a ton of open source games that are fun but I can run most of them in Windows. The handful that are worth it in my opinion that is. I don’t have hours to spend getting Wine to run something that a computer running Windows 98 can run without a problem either. And what about Cedega you may ask? Personally, I don’t feel that I should support a program that uses the same code as Wine and gives me nothing more than Wine with a fancy GUI. I’m the kind of person that installs a game and then gets a no-cd crack so they can play whenever without finding a cd. I want to play, not work.

So what does that leave me? Surfing, chat, email, and pictures. All of which Linux does fantastically. However, why should I install a 3 GB OS for surfing the internet when I already have Windows installed? Plus I don’t have to dual boot.  Security issues aside, it’s a waste of limited time and space. Audio and video fill up a 60gb hard drive quickly. And as far as pictures go, Linux has what I need to organize and edit but my built-in media card reader doesn’t work and I’m not willing to pay for and external one when the function is something I already have.

It pretty much comes down to the fact that you need to use whatever let’s you do whatever you need it to. Linux no longer does this for me and just takes up space on my hard drive. Will I ever try it again? You bet! When the latest Ubuntu or another big release comes around, I will be one of the first to download it and try it in a VM. I will also continue to recommend Linux whenever possible. As Lisa would say, “This isn’t good bye, just smell ya later”.

So someone figured out how to install Direct X 9.0c using Wine. This is a friggin’ huge step in the right direction for gamers out there that want to use Linux. I have no idea how well it works, but hopefully you can get close if not perfect windows-like speeds. Here’s  the link.