Linux desktop Productivity
This post is less of my usual type of post and more of a traditional blog post.
There will be a TL;DR list at the bottom, too.
I am a big fan of Linux as an operating system.
But whenever I tell that to people, especially people who are used to Windows, all I get is a lot of “Linux isn’t a good system, linux will never be as well supported or easy to use as windows, my apps don’t work on linux, bla, bla, bla.”
The point of this post is to showcase the software I use to get my laptops fully productive with as little work on my part as possible.
So instead of addressing everything, I’m just here to say that I get a lot more work done in linux, i think it’s objectively a better system (yes, even for non techy people), and here’s what I use:
OS:
This is a distro based on Ubuntu, but a lot of work has gone into the overall polish, and it shows. There’s nothing on it I couldn’t do myself in any other distribution with some manual package installation and configuration, but why bother? Also, it’s fast. Really fast. And completely stable.
Admittedly it’s aimed at windows users, but it includes a mac theme, officially you need to pay to get it but you can change it in the system settings without buying Ultimate, which adds a lot of unnecessary bloatware. Also, if you prefer mac, Elementary OS has you covered, and it’s almost as good as Zorin in my opinion. It’s only lacking in customization features out of the box, but being linux still allows more than Windows or Mac, if you’re willing to open a terminal(command line).
Bowser:
Firefox, but of course Chrome is available as well. (Chromium too).
Office Suite:
This is a major issue for most people with a job, or students. Microsoft Office is the undeniable king of offline (and not browser based) office software. For a while I simply ran an entire windows 10 VM to use office, but that is very cumbersome and finnicky. I also tried running it in wine, playonlinux, and crossover, but my cracked version doesn’t install well and honestly it’s not worth the time and effort to get it done. (EDIT: With much tinkering I now have Office 365 Installed via Crossover. Word, Powerpoint, and Excel work flawlessly. Outlook is hit or miss. But for editing, I can open Office same as in windows, including context menus and all.)
What I picked eventually was Softmaker Office. This required less work to get productive with than Libreoffice, and has better docx and pptx support in my experience.While the UI is very similar to MS Office, it is not quite that powerful, but for all my basic office needs it does the job perfectly. I do have a paid license, but the free version has almost everything the full versions do. Also, it works perfectly with RTL languages like hebrew and arabic, which not all office software does, for some reason.
Email client:
Another biggie for people used to Outlook .
Thunderbird is extremely powerful but was lacking in the UI department. I couldn’t get a 2 line subject like outlook has, so I ditched it.
Evolution is also very good, and includes a calendar tab just like outlook, but it required lots of settings to get working and looking the way I wanted. People looking for something that just works might not want to do that.
Kontact was great at first but a bit buggy and unreliable, so my final choice was Mailspring. It Just Works out of the box, looks awesome, is very customizable, has support for rules, manages gmail perfectly,(converting labels to folders but still retaining all label functionality). I’m currently very satisfied. The only downside is that it just does email, and doesn’t include anything like a calendar.
Basic text editing:
I use elementary code. It is the best Notepad++ Alternative I have found for linux. Installing it is a bit of a hassle if you don’t use elementary OS, but I have a guide on my github. (EDIT: I’ve moved to geany which has everything and more.)
Torrenting:
qBittTorrent. The GUI is a little dated, but works very well. Lightweight.
Games:
While I don’t play games on my computer very often, I have found that Wine, Playonlinux, and Lutris can handle nearly any windows game perfectly with no noticeable slowdown even with pvp play on my LAN.
TL;DR recap:
Zorin OS, Softmaker Office, Mailspring email.
qBittorrent, Terminator terminal, Lutris, playonlinux,