RSS Reading

I've basically just given in and started using Google Reader. I don't think this is the final resolution to this problem, but it works quite well and I'm happy with it for the time being. I think newsbeuter works with bloglines, and that might be the best solution but I haven't made the jump yet. After years of syncing with the newsgator service and NetNewsWire on my mac, downloading on my own seems much less ideal. But google isn't evil... yet, and so I'm very glad for reader.

TextMate and Text Editing

This was one of my largest concerns when I thought about switching. I was really attached to TextMate, and it was comfortable and very mac-y. While I had some trouble when I was using vim the, TextMate to emacs transition is pretty smooth, though I have a lot of emacs-ground to cover, all of my basic text-editing tasks are taken care of.

What I learned in this process, is that my text-editing requirements, which I thought were pretty intense, are actually reasonably simplistic. I've not yet mastered really powerful find-and-replaces in emacs (I tend to use vim for this, though I'm sure I'll be able to give this up at some point), or multiple file find-and-replaces (my gut says that I should be able to use sed but, I've never had much luck with sed.

Learning this about my process has been helpful, and I think I'm able to concentrate better in my Linux environment than I am in OS X any more. Powerful lessons.

IM Clients

Interestingly, the more I used Pidgin, the more I realized that the inconsistencies in the way the buddy list was maintained, and that I didn't like in Pidgin existed in Adium as well. I just hadn't noticed them: this is a great testament to the UI design of Adium. In the end, Pidgin works pretty well and I'm reasonably pleased with it. As near as I can tell I don't have a lot of options because I need the kind of multi-account/multi-protocol support that libpurple-based IM clients have.

I've tried running BitlBee locally, but I found the buddylist/roster hard to track in irssi (my IRC client of choice), who knows. If I ever switch from Pidgin, something like mcabber (if I can convince enough of my friends to reliably be accessible via XMPP), or BitlBee. But for the moment, I'm reasonably happy about this.

Web Development

Right after I got my Linux machine, I started work on a new web-development project for a friend, and I realized that all the things I was used to using (FTP clients, etc) weren't setup on the linux machine. And my web developent style tends to be pretty chaotic/frenzied and "test driven" (ie: "hey, lets see what this does! (pause) crap! what about this? (pause) crap! etc.") so I thought it would be a royal mess.

Turns out it wasn't. I started using gFTP which is nice. For my own servers I use some SCP based shortcuts I've written up for myself and I SSH into the server and edit things directly there, but for some things on this project having something graphical was a very good thing. It seemed to work. I'm not complaining.

Blog Posting

So I haven't found a really good XML-RPC client for blog posting on Linux to make up for the TextMate blogging bundle and MarsEdit options. While I'm thinking about trying out some of the blog posting software for gnome (to revive the "coda" sub-blog). I've switched to posting using the web interface.

This is good, because I can automate blog posting much easier, and it means my work schedule in the morning doesn't revolve around getting things posted. And the truth is that the WordPress interface is pretty good. So in someways maybe it's good that I'm doing things this way.

Music Syncing

Yeah, I'm still doing this on the mac, such as I sync my iPod mostly I just listen to music on my ipod, and tend to sync about every other time I go out of town. I'm thinking about switching to listening to Podcasts on my phone, and if I do that it wouldn't be a huge issue to move the music to the Linux box after the initial import. But I'm in no particular rush, given how often I sync my iPod, so this might linger for a while.

Does this mean that I'm an ex-mac user?

Onward and Upward!