I am on the edge again.  I’ve been here before, I’ve been to the other side, but this time, somehow it’s different…

I am really close.  Each time I get closer, more attuned, better acquainted.

Just what am i on the edge of?  Why, converting to Linux!  I have tried and failed repeatedly.  I have made some adjustments over time to help push this next go at it even farther.  For example, one of my main irritations is the lack of games in Linux.  Mac seems to be sort of catching up but Linux is still pretty far behind.  However I have gotten increasingly good at wrangling VMs and WINE to my will.  That and Desura has a Linux client now, and thanks to numerous Indie games bundles, I have a pretty substantial Desura Library going.

My other complaint is that Windows Live Writer does not run in Linux.  It still does not.  Which is sad and irritating and may, once again, be a deal breaker.  as stupid as it sounds, this program, which isn’t much more than a word processor, is a fantastic piece of work.  Mostly it takes the hassle out of the publishing portion.  I don’t have to upload images, I don’t have to finagle with Wodress’s slightly clunky dashboard.  I just set it in this program and hit “Publish”.  I tried doing everything in Google docs but that is such a crappy broken experience, especially the spreadsheets.  It’s not really blogging related but NOTHING beats Excel.  Open Office Calc, or whatever they are calling it these days is crappy as hell too.

I also have been using my dual boot on my laptop a bit more.  Unfortunately, once again, it’s a bit of a deal breaker because the touchpad emulation/drivers/whatever sucks and there is NO way to disable the useless “Gestures”.  Which means as I type, every time my wrists or thumbs brush the touch pad my cursor goes flying and things start scrolling undesirably.

After the move I DO plan to set up “my machine” in the office with Ubuntu.  Even it 90% of the time it runs a VM of Windows over top, it’ll be Ubuntu underneith,  I’ve also been looking into creating VMs from existing installs.  I have my Minecraft server that I’d like to push into a VM on the same machine.  Mostly because it also serves the function of being an OpenSIM server and a Radio Stream server at time.  Both of these are a pain in the ass to reconfigure and set up, especially the Radio server since I’ve done some clever hacks to do some clever things.  OpenSIM will work natively on Linux and I want to eventually convert, I imagine Minecraft will too and it’s worlds are easy to move around, but Radio DJ is Windows only.

Anyway, I feel like this could be “the time”, but I’ll probably just come crawling back to good old Windows.  The reality is, there is no need to switch, I can easy run and use both, which is really the better solution.