So I’ve been trying Ubuntu for a good while now, and while I love its speed and usage, I frankly need the compatibility of windows. I went into this experiment saying things like “I hate windows cruft” and “I just want to use my computer and not have to worry about windows”. I come out if it saying… “But I don’t want to have to switch OSes to use that app, and I can’t stand the thought of running one OS inside another for compatibility sake.” and “what do you mean I can’t do that in Ubuntu, I know I could in windows by doing XYZ.”
Now to be clear, I am by no means free of my hatred of Windows cruft, but as a game developer I need to be able to run certain things on my box or I’m not really even close to being able to stay up to speed. Things like well supported 3d tools (I’m looking at you 3ds max). Yes, I know there is blender, but last I checked most major game engines laugh at the question of blender support.
Really right now though, the majority of my time is being spent on Flex development and keeping up my main product at work (a c++ monster mash of techs). I was working on getting set up in linux for flex development, and tried doing things like not using Flex Builder. It was just too painful.
So I started looking at Flex Builder for linux… beta? WTF? The more I read the more I realized that the linux community is third class to Adobe. I figured they would rank a close second behiund OSX. I was wrong. So little to no support for Flex Builder… lack of ability to run a LOT of game tools. Crap. I have to use windows. That means a reload. Why? Because my main machine at work was a hand me down that has not been rebuilt in a long time. That and its a 32 bit os on a 64 bit machine.
So I started digging into things. I first loaded the Windows 7 RC just to check it out. Looked slick. Then IE crashed and I uninstalled and went to Vista 64. Service packs and so forth later, I started digging around for ways to make my vista experience faster, less crufty, and more well…. Ubuntu like. 
Here is my list of things done so far:
- Disable unneeded services. This means you Aero theme. Classic for the speed win.
- Load notepad2 and use it as my default notepad. Syntax editing, very fast.
- Loading all my icons in my quicklaunch bar that I need a lot. Firefox, IE, Eclipse, and CMD. Then using Windows key + # I can quick launch them without the mouse. Woot.
- Loaded SlikSVN. Tortoise is a frickin’ resource hog. Learning the SVN command line tools is a good investment and is quickly paying of in speed.
So with all that done, I was sitting with a dual core machine, using up less than a gig of memory, sitting idle.
Things I still want to do:
- get the command prompt to recognize some linux commands… mv, ls, etc. I know this is fairly trivial, I just haven’t done it yet. (Note, I hate cygwin, don’t get me started).
More info on any of the topics above is just a google away, so no links to help you out. Sorry, gotta run. My bow is calling me.
One Comment
Hm… what was it that I used before? Might have been GnuWin32 or something. Well, whatever it was, it worked pretty well. I got so used to typing ‘ls’ at a dos prompt that it was hard to switch back.