Adventures in Switching to Linux

One of the things I love about Gnome is the ability to easily load different themes. Windows doesn't have a concept like this. There are add on applications like WindowBlinds but my experience with that is the performance cost is way to great. There are a bunch of sites that have themes and wallpapers such as art.gnome.org and Gnome-Look. I use art.gnome.org A LOT to download wallpapers for all of my systems, Windows included. Gnome allows you to change the application theme, window borders, icons, backgrounds and more.

Because of all this awesome UI customization goodness, I am going to take some time occasionally to post a screen shot from one of my Ubuntu systems. Today's screen shot is from my secondary work machine. This machine is a Celeron 1.8GHz, 630MB of RAM with an Intel 82845G based video card. It is running Compiz (a compositing window manager that uses 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL) for all sorts of fun and useful eye candy. Compiz worked right out of the gates from what I remember on this system. This is my only system that is currently running Compiz though. I think my home system can but I have higher priorities.

My work Linux desktop does run pretty slowly though. It is fairly under powered and I push it to its limits. I am not sure if Compiz is slowing it down any. I'll turn it off again one day and see. Another thing I want to mention about this system is I uses Synergy to access it. Synergy is wonderful. I recommend it for anyone with multiple systems and multiple monitors that don't want the hassle of a KVM switch. Several people at my office use it to access their Mac laptops too since it works on Linux, OS X and Windows.

Now, without further ado... (click on the image for a larger version)


I also wanted to point out a few things about this image. One, the background I am using is one of my favorite* Gnome backgrounds (so far at least) called Gnome Gallery. There are a ton of backgrounds with the Gnome logo incorporated into them. So many in fact that they have a whole section devoted to them. Sorry this is a crappy JPG. The PNG was 1.6MB and not really worth it. Also, I got to play with Gimp (Photoshop replacement? We shall see.) to save the default PNG to a JPG at 60% quality. I might save the next one at a higher quality or just stick with the PNG.

Ah yes, and the other very important thing that I LOVE that I wanted to mention. Screen shots are a breeze in Gnome! In Windows you can press PrintScreen to capture the screen to the clipboard. Gnome takes it a step farther and throws up an application to automatically save that screen shot as a PNG somewhere. Alt + PrintScreen will just capture the selected window instead of the entire screen by the way.

* The default spell checking language in Firefox currently is British English. I'm an American so I opt to spell the word "favorite" instead of "favourite". Oh look, now it is US English.