The facts: Acer Aspire 5100 (Turion 64 X2, 2gb of ram, 100gb hd)

Used for: Desktop computing, music production and recording, web design and development.

I've tried several distros over the past couple years (Fedora, Slack, Ubuntu, MEPIS, PCLOS, Mandriva, openSUSE, Kanotix, and dyne:bolic) and have yet to find deliverance.

I've been running solely on XP for the last 6 months!! It's not that Windows is bad, per say, but I need more stability and a system that doesn't slow down so much (this laptop was lightning fast when I got it... a month of XP and it feels half-speed or less).

Critical Apps: Dreamweaver 8, Flash 8, Cakewalk Sonar 4.

Current Plan:

I don't believe there are any suitable solutions in OSS for the apps above. Nvu does not even come close to DW (especially when dealing with CSS and absolute div positioning). So I think part of my solution will be to go with Parallels Workstation, as much as I hate to do it. Don't get me wrong, Parallels is awesome, but I still have to run Windows...

DreamLinux. In my eternal quest for the best distro for my needs, I've identified DreamLinux as a potential. It's still growing in popularity, but the few reviews that have been written are extremely favorable. I was considering Mandriva's Powerpack, but I get the feeling they aren't delivering anything I can't get done myself... correct me if I'm wrong. Also, any opinions on DreamLinux would be great too.

I don't need support, so I don't know if a commercial package is worth it.

I've presented the case above for critique. If you have any ideas how I can improve the setup please let me know! I have converted several friends to linux and I am jealous... just because I have special software needs, am I doomed to Windows?

Thanks

-Garrett

In a word, yes. You consider proprietary Windows apps with no Linux equivalent (Flash), and hardware/software combinations (Cakewalk Sonar), that I'm sure the vendor would not port to Linux for one customer, to be essential. You will not find a Linux environment that can run those apps in the same seamless way they run on Windows. If you must run those applications and can only have one computer, you are probably better off putting up with Windows' annoying performance. If you absolutely insist on having Linux, you might be able to set your computer up for dual booting, using Windows for music and flash animation, and using Linux for other tasks, especially networked tasks (Internet). The best setup (if you insist on having Linux) would be a second computer for all the things you do that don't require Windows.

But if it were me considering the switch, I would stop as soon as I realized my most important applications only run on Windows and curse the companies behind them that resist porting their applications... and maybe curse myself for investing too heavily in solutions that limit my future choices.

Are you familiar much with Parallels?

I'm wondering if it may not be a better position to run Windows from Linux when needed (for just the key apps mentioned). Parallels claims to have "near native" speeds, which seems like a highly relative statement.

I find it too much of a hindrance to dual-boot... but stay on Windows??

Why is life so difficult?

-Garrett

I hadn't heard of Parallels until you mentioned it. Virtual machine. Well, you could go that route, too. Might be fun. "near native speeds"... that could mean several things. $50 bucks. Hmm... Well, that might be your answer.

Thanks for the help, I'm leaning towards that right now. If Flash will run in the VM efficiently, this could turn out really great!

Picking a Stable and Fast Linux Distro is the chief concern now. I'm going to have to work on that a bit more.

-Garrett

Here is some 64 bit distros for you to look at:

SUSE
http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org

Fedora
http://fedora.redhat.com/

Gentoo
http://www.gentoo.org/

Kanotix
http://kanotix.com/

Kubuntu
www.Kubuntu.org

Knoppix64
http://www.applia.fr/contents/knoppix64.html

Gnoppix
http://www.nongnu.org/gnoppix/

Thanks for the suggestions. I've not ran a 64 bit distro yet. I suppose the clincher would be whether or not Parallels will run in a 64 bit environment. I wonder how big a difference it makes to use a 64bit os...

I guess SUSE would be one of the most stable of that bunch?

-Garrett

Does Parallels Workstation 2.2 support 64-bit platforms?
Parallels Workstation 2.2 runs successfully on 64-bit platforms if a 32-bit primary OS is installed on it. Support for 64-bit primary and guest OSes is in scope for future versions of Parallels Workstation.


...Bummer. 32 bit I stay.

64 Studio may be worth looking at. ALthough if you insist on those windows apps your best bet would be to either run Linux then run windows in a virtual machine of some type or just dual boot.

For Flash development on Linux platform you may want to take a look at:
Open Source Flash - open_source_flash_projects
http://www.osflash.org/open_source_flash_projects

Dreamweaver does work with Wine:
Wine Application DB - Viewing App - Dreamweaver
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=183

There are also many webpage editors available for Linux that you may want to consider:

W3C Tools (replacements for Front Page, MS Publisher and others): Tools for Linux and Windows:

• W3C Amaya Amaya is a complete online web browsing and authoring environment and comes equipped with a WYSIWYG style of interface, similar to that of the most popular commercial browsers. With such an interface, users do not need to know the HTML or CSS languages ..... and its open source and "FREE".
  NVU Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.
  OpenOffice Webwriter is a WYSIWYG web site design tool, part of the OpenOffice suite. It has features very similar to that of Microsoft's FrontPage.
  Seamonkey Composer keeps getting better with dynamic image and table resizing, quick insert and delete of table cells, improved CSS support, and support for positioned layers. For all your simple documents and website projects, Composer is all you need."
  SciTE:is a GUI-based single-document editor which uses the Scintilla editor component. It rapidly styles most common programming languages with good control over how syntactic elements are displayed, and features folding for C++, C, Java, JavaScript, and Python. Styling of HTML also styles embedded scripts written in VBScript, Javascript, or Python.
  SCREEM:is a web development environment. It's purpose is to increase productivity when constructing a site, by providing quick access to commonly used features. While it is written for use with the GNOME desktop environment in mind it does not specifically require you to be running it, just have the libraries installed.
  Quanta Plus:is a web development tool for the GNU/Linux K Desktop Environment.Quanta is designed for quick web development and is rapidly becoming a mature editor with a number of great features and lies at the heart of the KDE Web Dev suite of tools.
  Bluefish:is a powerful editor for experienced web designers and programmers.
  Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, but it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites.

Sometimes it pays to learn to use more than one tool to do the same job. Besides it is more than worth the effort just to get rid of windows and too dive into Linux.

Quanta Plus is the best of the editors I've tried so far. I've only recently found Bluefish, so I don't know enough to have an opinion. I don't do Flash, but I know there are tools for that in Linux.

Currently I have a laptop (Acer Travelmate 1.6G Centrino M) with Suse 10.2 & the KDE desktop, and a desktop PC (1.8G AMD Duron) with Fedora Core 6 and Gnome. I use Quanta Plus, Gimp, & gFtp on both. Both very solid. I need to add RAM to the desktop, as it does slow down if I have Gimp & Quanta Plus open at the same time.

Before I moved from Windows, I used PhotoShop, and HomeSite. I found HomeSite because it was the HTML editor in Dreamweaver, and once I got the hang of it I stopped using DW! So far (more than 2 years in) I haven't felt the need to go back to Windows, except for testing with IE, and as soon as I can get IE4Linux running I can give it up completely.

Thanks for the info Craigevil. Thanks sadigdm for your experience as well.

I guess DW and Sonar could be replaced with the right selection of OSS. I am, sadly, a WYSIWYG fan because absolute positioning without a visual reference is like stabbing in the dark to me. I don't know of any OSS editor that can help me there. Past that, I edit by hand, so Quanta or Bluefish would probably work out ok. But run DW in Wine? Gee, if that works, I'm half-way there!

64 Studio looks like an interesting distro. Until I'm sure I can handle life without a Windows VM though, I'm going to use openSUSE 10.2 32bit since it's fully supported by parallels.

If that open source flash project can really work (all I make are simple ads and buttons in flash) then I may be able to get away with a simple dual boot option, booting to windows in only the most critical of situations. I could also use the dual boot for recording since that is not a normal part of my day (we only get together to record on certain days).

Thanks so much for your help so far, it's has really been valuable to me! I have been longing to come back to Linux for so long and, this time, I think I see light at the end of the tunnel.

Edit: BTW sabigdm, IE4Linux works great, I set it up on a Ubuntu system not to long ago. The biggest issue I had was not being able to get it to use Flash and Java.

-Garrett

The 64bit distros, lack the stability I desire. Software is hard to find, unless you jump through hoops to make 32bit apps install on 64bit OS's. My hardware supports 64bit fine, but I've chosen to stick with 32bit, simply because all software is available to me, stable, etc..

YMMV

IGF