This note’s for you

After some weeks of having to deal with Windows, I finally upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu. What a relief! Here’s a (not so) short list of immediate advantages that I missed badly on Windows:

• Virtual desktops. Really, can’t live without this. Desktop becomes utterly cluttered when more than 3 windows are open. And I usually have 20 or so. I know there are tools that do similar on Windows (my laptop had one from NVidia) but this is really not the same.
• All important software and drivers on board. Installation was a breeze (a few clicks and 20 minutes waiting) and when finished, _everything_ just worked. Including wifi, printer, scanner. Maybe I was just lucky, or maybe Linux dramatically improved over the last couple of years. And of course, no day long searching web for stuff, installing tons of crapware, etc.
• More consistent, usable and clean UI. On Windows, every app seems to be proud of looking and behaving differently. This is nice for the bling, but makes using the computer unnecessarily difficult. And then there’s small but significant details that make life easier on Ubuntu.
• Worldclock applet. Extremely useful when your team is all over the world.
• Language support. I always considered this obvious, but apparently, it’s not.
• No need to run millions of apps in the system tray to keep your system half up to date. (The other half still needs manual updates ).
• No need to run all kinds of security software, firewalls (they are still a good idea, but I usually don’t  use them on my laptop and never had any problem), virus scanner.
• It uses all 4 GB of my RAM. Which is actually quite important when you make heavy use of virtual machines (for running Windows ).
• Cultural stuff: Apps on Linux usually install themselves, and not a handful of other pieces of software. Recent example on Windows: After having installed some codecs (yay, I was thinking that codecs are a non-problem on Windows, but it’s not the case..) I found that I now have Google Chrome as well. Not that I object trying Chrome, but I prefer to be in control of what gets installed or not.

I probably could continue this list, but I leave that task to you readers if you like ;-). The point is, I have absolutely no pressing need (as in Hardware or Software that only works with Windows) to run Windows as base OS. It’s actually much better to run it in VirtualBox, where I can easily reset it to a clean state when I want to. This is cool for testing anyway. And working on Ubuntu instantly gives me a productivity boost of at least 50-100%.

At least according to Symantec.

I want to make a screenshot, but I don’t know how to do this in Windows XP. I probably need the Ultimate Edition or so. God, this crappy OS doesn’t even have the most basic functionality, or it hides it so well that nobody finds it. No, the print key doesn’t work.

Folks, I really gave this OS another serious chance. Actually I was more or less forced to, due to my new job and new hardware and lack of Linux install CDs for 2 weeks in the US. But it so gets in the way of everything and is generally so unusable, I think I really do the same update that David Gilbert (*) mentioned in the article above.

Interesting side detail: I tried a couple of games in Windows that I tried in Wine before, it must be said that nowadays almost all games I would want to play work perfect in Wine (Heroes series, Starcraft, Baldur’s Gate, Settlers series), some show the same buggy behaviour in Windows as in Wine (SimCity4) and some others actually work better in Wine (!!), namely Settlers IV and Baldur’s Gate I. As far as I found out it’s a bug in the NVidia driver not supporting DirectDraw properly.

* David, is that you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gilbert ?

Update: Ok, thanks to Robert I managed to make the print key work. Here is the screenshot:

Short summary of happened and happening things:

• JavaOne2009: Great. Lots of faces to finally put on email addresses, IRC nicknames, etc.
• San Francisco: Great. Includes previous point. Plus: Seafood (oh my!). Extremely poor vs. extremely rich people. Lots of things that I almost got done, but not quite. Some photos.
• Cacio: Great: Of course. BOF went good, but attendence was low. Should have invited all the audience for beer instead. Seems we are not that famous after all Many small things improved before, during and after JavaOne.
• East Coast: Great. New job. Setting up stuff. Not much real work so far. Couple of interesting dinners and philosophic chats with new boss. And Terminator.
• Neil Young Archives: Great! First seen at JavaOne (yay). Seen again in record store. Could not resist. Must watch trailer.
• FontManager: Still trying to set a record for pushing the largest patch ever into OpenJDK Round 5.
• Family: Not great. Miss them quite badly. 3 more days to go…

I know I am supposed to write about JavaOne, my new Job at Sun, the USA, all the cool stuff that happens in Cacio, etc, but this is probably much more interesting: Is there an artificial god?

Andrei gets things rolling.

Today I added support for menus to Cacio:

This was the last missing widget. The remaining tasks for Cacio are now:

• Finetuning (event handling, painting, etc)
• Performance (yeah yeah)
• Get TCK and see if it’s compatible
• Profit! (Ooops)

.. ah and of course go to JavaOne and have a great time

Today the flights and hotels have finally been booked. Man, that was an oddysee. Seems like nothing that I do is easy and straightforward. Except maybe Java2D pipelines. (If you think Java2D pipelines are NOT easy and straightforward, you should see the other things that I do.. ;-).) Thanks to everybody involved! Have been quite a lot of people. Probably half of Sun knows me by now. I will arrive in San Francisco on May, 31st, and stay in Whitcomb hotel until saturday, so if anybody wants to meet me there, just ping somehow or come to our Cacio BOF on tuesday. Man, I am so excited! This is my first trip to the US, and actually, is my first flight ever! I guess San Francisco is a nice destination for a first-US and first-flight!

In other news, Mario has implemented an SDL backend for Cacio, in more or less one day, YAY! This is so cool. The best thing is, it should work on Linux, Windows, and a couple of other targets as well. And of course, it will be included in Cacio, next to my shiny new X11 backend. Cacio FTW!

And in even other news (<- now that was pretty smart, eh??), I did a basic implementation of the CacioScrollPanePeer, something I always thought impossible. But thanks to our latest tricks, it was fairly easy instead.

Today is screenshot day. So here comes the first signs of life of Mario’s AWT demo:

Compare to how the default Linux AWT looks like:

Here are two more screenshots of Cacio with Nimbus. The screenshots are from a (not yet opened) AWT test that Andrei sent me, so no source code, but screenshots. (Mario is working on a much cooler and free AWT demo…) The first one is an AWT TextArea with scrollers (yay) showing the instructions:

The second one are some AWT Checkboxes, that can also act as radio buttons, and an AWT List with scroller:

Who said that AWT is ugly??

So today we made nice progress:

This is an AWT TextArea, shown using the (Swing) Nimbus L&F. Yay. Ok, granted, it has glitches, but I wanted to get the screenie out before going to bed. Will fix this tomorrow. Ah, and I solved my performance problems too. Actually, before solving them, there were no glitches, so: performance++, appearance–.