tl;dr Two months after using Ubuntu full time, here are my thoughts on the linux desktop
My History With Linux
I have long used a Chromebook as my primary development laptop. At first, I used online code editors like Nitrious.io and Cloud9 to edit code. Thoes editors are great, but I never felt like I was in complete control of my code. Viewing a file browser, a command line and an IDE all in one browser tab just seemed like too much all at once.
Right around the time my daughter was born 2 years ago, I attempted to dual boot a proper linux distro on my Samsung Chromebook with crouton. Having a honest-to-goodness linux install was a breath of fresh air and it was an amazing few days. However, issues started to bubble up when I went to install software for work. Skype wouldn’t work properly. Then my IDE of choice wouldn’t install correctly.
Come to find out that the Samsung Chromebook that I owned was based on an ARM processor instead of an Intel based processor, which limited the software that was able to run on it. With my tail between my legs, I uninstalled crouton and went back to cloud IDE land.
Taking Action
About 6 months ago, the itch came back. The itch to use a real distro and not some cloud emulation. I purchaed the HP14 Chromebook on woot.com which gave me 3 additional inches of screen space and a much needed Intel processor. Thirty minutes later, I was in heaven. Firefox, Skype, HipChat, Komodo, Spotify…all working perfectly. And a real terminal at my finger tips.
Then I had to go to work. We recently started a new project at work called ‘Innovation Hour’. The programmers at Sycamore Education take the afternoon on Friday’s off and work on side projects. There is really no limit to what you’re allowed to work on except that it cannot be something that you would work on during normal business hours. We are to use that time to innovate, learn or experiment. During that time I was attempting to learn a javascript framework called Ember, but was having a lot of trouble doing so on a Windows machine with no first-class command line interface. Two days before Christmas, I took my life into my own hands and reparitioned my hard drive so that I could install Ubuntu.
Caveat emptor
While attempting to repartition my hard drive, I screwed something up. I changed the type of partition where I wasn’t supposed to and ended up nuking my entire drive. (Turns out I had 2 hard drives in a RAID set up, which I wasn’t aware of.) I was upset for all of 5 minutes until I realized that all my code was on Github, all my documents were on Google Drive and all my photos were on an external hard drive. The biggest thing I lost was my collection of clipart and fun memes that I had collected over the last 4 years.
After installing Ubuntu 14 LTS, I booted it up for the first time. It was magical. It was running on a beefy desktop machine with a decent graphic card, so my dual monitor setup was not disturbed. I quickly set out to install all of my most used apps. I connected to our network with any issues. I found our local network printer and installed the drivers without any problems. In fact, things were going so well that I was sure something would go wrong soon.
Final Thoughts
I’m still waiting for something to go wrong. My only issue thus far was some insane lag and memory issues with the Firefox Developer Edition which, to its credit, was very new when I was using it.
I generally have HipChat, the Spotify Linux Preview, Firefox a half dozen tabs, 3 or 4 terminals and Skype open all at once with 0 performance issues. With those day-to-day programs, along with Google Docs/Sheets, my entire work stack accounted for.
Now, I don’t think that a Linux desktop is for everyone, but I will be advocating for all of the developers at our company to switch to some flavor of Linux for their next computer purchase. All in all, its been a great experience.