I’ve been using multiple operating systems for some time now as part of our tasks here at Bluebit are to run cross browser tests on different browsers on Windows, OSX and Linux, as well as mobiles such as Windows Mobile, iOS and Android. I’ve always been fascinated by the power and flexibility of Linux and have, probably for the last 10 years wondered if it were possible to really and I mean really switch my workstation environment to Linux.
The big problem I had was finding the right tools to carry out my daily tasks that would replace my stalwart of apps that I used in Windows. The browsers were covered as my web browser of choice is Google Chrome (although recently I’ve recently switched back to Firefox) and my email client was Thunderbird. This is available on most distributions (distros) of Linux. So what about an office suite? Well, I’ve been using Openoffice for some time now on Windows and find that it provides me with all the tools such as an Excel, Powerpoint, Access and Word equivalent. It’s incredibly powerful and also reads and writes Microsoft Office documents, although sometimes the formatting goes a bit wrong when exporting/importing between formats.