Bildung

Mid last year I bought a second hand Lenovo T470 and installed Linux Mint on it. I wanted to see how far I could bring it to handle my main work tasks. Almost there it looks like!

Graphics, layouts etc: I tried these under macos before, where they are super sluggish most of the time. Under a more native(?) environment, these apps are significantly more snappy and solid: – “photoshop”: glimpse – “illustrator”: inkscape – “indesign”: scribus

For wireframes: – draw.io / diagrams.net voor lo-fi wireframes and diagrams – when necessary, figma in the browser, but I don't often work on that level of design-fidelity anymore.

Notes, writing: – Visual Studio Code for code editing, random notes. BBEdit is turning out the hardest to replace. such a rock solid program. As with Atom, Sublime Text, it's al; very configurable but eh, not quite right or comfortable. Yet, I suppose. – Obsidian for notes, writing – Joplin for tasks & projects

Mindmaps: Xmind

Cloud things: Nextcloud via thegood.cloud in NL: file storage, calendar, notes sync for Joplin.

Email: Thunderbird, was already using it under macos.

Browser: Firefox, my default under macos as well.

Local web development: Getting a local lamp stack up and running turned out to be the most cumbersome. On Mac there is MAMPpro that provides an extensive GUI for managing PHP, MySQL, Apache. Creating virtual hosts etc. For Linux, there's only the much simpler XAMPP for getting a LAMPP stack up and running. It comes with phpmyadmin for the database bits, which is fine, but setting up virtual hosts requires good old editing of apache config files. Bleh, but ok.

Annoyances: – typing special characters, no idea how to do it other than copy-pasting from the Character map app. I mean, I know there are ways, but all are unwieldy. – Save dialog: start typing, I expect to enter a file name but it appears to start a search.

Better than expected: – the USB-C port works great, driving my large LG monitor – no problems driving an external monitor through DVI and an old VGA-via-USBC adapter beamer at the same time – overall speed and snappyness