Simon Willison’s Weblog

Switched

29th January 2003

I never thought I’d actually do it, but I’ve switched. Not to one of these (I only wish I could afford it), but to Mandrake 9. The way I figured it I only ever use Windows 98 for browsing the web, editing text files and messing around with Python, so I might as well get stuck in to a more exciting operating system with the same capabilities.

Phoenix on Linux is exactly the same as Phoenix on Windows, and remains an absolute pleasure. My mail is now handled by Evolution, which has been crunching through my six week backlog (don’t ask) on both of my mail accounts with consumate ease, thanks to the excellent filtering. I’ve also been introduced to Dillo, a truly tiny graphical web browser (less than 200KB compiled) which never the less does a great job of rendering table based sites at almost ridiculous speeds. CSS is completely ignored, but CSS sites tend to be perfectly usable without formatting anyway.

The only thing I’m really missing is a good text editor—I’m spoiled for choice, but nothing I’ve played with so far has been half as productive as UltraEdit. I think I need to pick a Unix editor and stick with it until I’ve learnt it inside out, but deciding which one to dedicate myself to is proving difficult.