As a sort of follow up to the article here I decided to continue to attempt to scratch my Linux itch.

Reasoning that maybe virtual machines aren’t a fair reflection of a system’s capabilities I went and bought a little netbook. I went for a little Acer Aspire in the January sales. This is a relatively cheap model, but it was the Christmas break so I had a little bit of time to kill.

Now that I had the machine, I had to put a few things on. Thus far the apps I’m happiest with are:

• Mail: Thunderbird
• Browser: Firefox
• IM: Skype
• News: Liferea
• Video: VLC
• Editor: Sublime Text 2
• Music: Banshee
• File Sharing: Dropbox
• Desktop Enviornment: i3 WM

So far it’s working out very well. Still haven’t been able to VPN into the office though. Development has been a breeze and my command line skills are already picking up.

Still, it has to be said, 100% of media work (Photoshop, Flash, After Effects) takes place on the Mac. Outside of those though, the experience so far has been good.