Looking into Linux
I’ve recently done somewhat of a ‘re-evaluation’ of my web developing needs. What I have come to is that I really only need a few ingredients to work properly. Now obviously these needs are in the context of a computer because we all know to do development you need something with which you compute. 
I certainly will need some bare bones terminal access. I prefer to do my file editing in a text editor versus vim and TextMate is my current weapon of choice. I also prefer a GUI (s)FTP/SSH client to the terminal related commands. My current weapon in that area is Transmit. I’ll be needing a web browser to actually use the applications and code I’m writing as well. In a nut-shell those are my needs in a regular project.
I will say that I open up Photoshop to get certain projects started because a designer has whipped up a fancy design for a project. I open the PSD and chop away creating the proper elements for CSS. This is really the only time I ever need any image editing software.
What this boils down to is me looking into a much smaller footprint of an operating system. These basic needs naturally are coexisting with the wants of checking email and some media playing etc. This list has quite naturally led me to look into Linux.
Growing up in a house with a ‘computer guy’ for a father I heard the names UNIX and Linux all the time. It wasn’t until I bought my first Mac that I realized UNIX wasn’t just some old out-dated thing that was only good in the computer history books. As I began to learn more about how web servers worked and writing web applications I heard the Linux thing many-a-time and then realized it had many ‘flavors’. Upon setting up (really I watched a guy smarter than me set it up) my first development server at work I learned that there is a GUI side of Linux I never really knew about. I’d only seen Fedora at the time and now I was being introduced to CentOS.
All that to say I will be looking into different Linux flavors somewhat soon. So far I have the following on my list to check out (in no particular order):
- Fedora
- PCLinuxOS
- gOS
- Ubuntu
- LinuxMint
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Comments
Thanks for your thoughts Bradley. I’m actually rockin’ the same setup on the desktop side and a 2.0ghz first round MacBook. I have Apache/MySQL/PHP setup on both for home stuff. In the church office we have a CentOS install running on ESXi with the same setup server/db wise.
I’ll toss in my .02 cents here. I’ve been weaning myself off Windows based systems for the past 2+ years . . . my main system was a Fedora Core 7 box back a while ago. Now my system is a new iMac 20″ 2.4ghz system. I would highly recommend that combo, because the workflow with graphics/video/etc… as well as web design stuff is just fantastic. I’ve used one at two of my former employers, and the one I was designing Flash based web applications for corporate software and the other I was designing a phone billing system and importing data from a legacy system. My laptop that I carry now has Fedora Core 9 and I love it for that purpose. I run a mini-web server stack on it running Linux/Apache/Postgres/PHP for an environment. (I’ve always gravitated more towards Postgres for it’s broader capabilities.) Right now I’m designing a child check in system that will be entirely based on that exact hardware/software stack with Ubuntu as the OS.
I’ll say right now — you are in a much better position than I was 10+ years ago when I first started playing with Linux. I put together a 486 system years ago and ran RH5.2 and that was how I started learning. I was pretty amazed the other day, I bought a bluetooth adapter for my Dell laptop and plugged it in and it just worked . . . which was pretty amazing considering the normal hoops you have to jump through with Linux drivers/etc… from the old days. (Thanks to the bluetooth adapter I can tether my laptop to my phone for wireless access.)
On the graphics side of things — GIMP is your best bet, but it’s not exactly Photoshop, but if you learn it’s quirks and ins/outs it can be a usable solution. I use Openoffice for my word processing needs as well as Google Docs so I don’t consider that an issue.
Hope this helps you a bit!