Day two, and everything’s cool so far. I’m in the process of tracking down applications to replace the ones I’m used to. For the last few years, I’ve used Nero to burn CD’s and more recently, DVD’s – but it’s a Windows program, so now I have to find the best equivalent in Linux. Sites like Freshmeat are great places to search for Linux applications, but the key word there is search. Lots of searching. If Freshmeat added user reviews like CNet’s Download.com, then it’d be easier to see a program’s weak spots at a glance. A program might have a hundred user reviews on Download.com, but I just read the negatives and look for serious problems that would affect my own use. With Freshmeat, I’m forced to hunt around through each program’s site looking at the features, the wish list, the bugs, etc., trying to gauge how far down the development road a program is. Freshmeat’s Vitality and Popularity statistics are a good start, but not accurate enough.
And so I’ve got a lot of apps to replace: my webcam, my FTP client, my CVS client, and so on. Nothing too tough, just a matter of research.
