.

But I need Photoshop…

Gimp! Bluefish! Ubuntu-restricted-extras! VLC! Yes, you’ve read all the articles on Digg about the replacement software. Some of them are awesome, and yes some of them kinda suck, and best of all they are all free! Some of you are saying they are hard to use so you won’t switch, but I’m here to tell you that you’re asking yourself the wrong questions. You should be asking things like:

Do I really use Photoshop on my tiny laptop all the time to justify keeping Windows?

Am I just doing basic image editing when I do use Photoshop?

In my case, I’m barely doing any Photoshop work on my laptop anymore. I may do some basic image work–for that I have the Gimp, and it does everything I could possibly want it to.

And just to prevent you haters out there from leaving me comments about how you can run Photoshop with Wine or Crossover Office–I’ve tried every which way and NEVER had I had a fully functional non-crashing version of Photoshop higher than Photoshop 7. Both CS, and CS2 crash and/or freeze. Photoshop 7 vs. The Gimp–I’ll take the Gimp anytime.

I get what you’re saying, but I’m a developer, I need Coda or Dreamweaver

So, you’re a developer and you use Coda, or Dreamweaver… Should you really be saying, “I can’t LIVE without Dreamweaver!” (If you’re not handwriting code, are you really a developer anyways?)

Am I really going to be doing full website development on my laptop?

Yes I might. In that case you have plenty of text editors: Bluefish, Quanta, GEdit, and you have Filezilla or GFTP to upload files.

If you’re a bit like me, you’re not managing huge development projects on your laptop. You may blog, and do some troubleshooting here and there–for that you have all you need with Firefox.

If you just edit a file here and there you can setup a permanent connection to your server via Places>Connect to server. That way I can open files directly with GEdit just like I would with Coda and edit them directly on my website.

A few other notes for developers…

The Web Developer and Firebug add-on both work in Ubuntu, and installing them is a breeze. In fact, rather than rooting around all the freebie websites you can install all your software at once from one place:

Applications>Add/Remove then select Show: All available applications

This includes most of the popular Firefox add-ons that you may do for web development, and some that you just like to use. (I personally love Foxy Tunes which lets me easily navigate my Pandora stations)

What about testing my websites in IE6?

I must admit this was one thing that kept Windows on my laptop for quite awhile. I had an old copy of IE6 on the Windows XP installation and it was my only last excuse for keeping the dual boot. After having to wait 8 minutes for startup everytime I restarted (Thanks to Windows Defender, Zone Alarm, and a few other things) I had had enough.

I googled IE for Linux–sure enough there was already a working IE6 package for Ubuntu. IEs4Linux took just a few minutes to download and install and now I have a functioning installation of IE6 on my laptop to test out my sites with! It even has a strange upside down IE logo!

Fine, there are other alternatives, but seriously–Ubuntu is just ugly and uncool

Here’s the real kicker for why I resisted switching for the longest time… Ubuntu is pretty ugly. The picky designer in me wants a combination of the cool themes plus the smooth animation and performance of OSX.

Enter Avant, Awn-Manager, Compiz, and Emerald. After adding those via the add/remove section outlined above, I have a nice OSX style dock, a cool icon theme, a cool window border them, and after downloading a GDM theme from Gnome-Look.org my computer is looking just as slick as OSX!

After getting GMail and the weather on my desktop with Conky, I personally think I have something a bit better than the silly widget dashboard from OSX! You can install themes for Avant as well!

Conclusion

I must admit, it took me just a little while to tweak things to get them just the way I wanted them. (The avant-window-manager and conky mostly) You may have to get your hands dirty using GEdit and the command line, but ultimately it’s a pretty stable installation, it’s lightning quick, and very easy to connect to the internet.

I must admit I do miss Photoshop a bit, but I still have a desktop computer with the full CS3 suite on it so if I really feel like doing some design work I can–but for now I’ll stick with my Ubuntu.