Linux Mint, Go Die

About a month ago a friend installed Linux Mint 8 Helena on my PC to replace Windows XP, which was causing me a lot of problems. At first, I thought Linux was considerably superior to Windows because everything was running so smoothly. An hour later the problems began and a seed of dubiousness appeared. A whole four weeks later I can no longer stand all the problems I'm having and I'm proud to say that I'm moving back to XP.

To give you an idea of what's going wrong here's a list of ten problems I'm having with Linux Mint 8 Helena. They include hardware and software issues alike. So if you're considering moving to Linux takes these into consideration before you go anywhere.

Webcam

I have a girlfriend who lives in France so webcam chat is essential to our relationship. It's been four weeks since she's seen me and I've seen her. And all thanks to Linux being so evil. It wouldn't allow webcam chat over the Internet or any MSN clients.

I tried using Twitcam and Ustream, aMSN and Kmess, Meebo and eBuddy, practically everything, but none of them worked. Ironically, I could view my webcam in desktop applications such as Cheese, which is really quite confusing.

I was told by a friend that there may be an issue with my router stopping me from sending webcam chat, something to do with a firewall. I'll make sure I update when I've installed XP to let you know whether or not I have the same issue with Windows.

Was there a solution to this problem? I scoured the Internet and left post after post on the official Linux Mint forums but all the troubleshooting advice I got didn't work and usually wasted hours of my time fiddling with complex commands in CLIs. It's really pathetic.

I literally had to log into my router settings in order to change a whole load of ports around and create custom rules for specific protocols in order to allow the sending of webcam. But even after all of that I still could not stream webcam over the Internet.

You'll also be pleased to hear that the default MSN client bundled with Linux Mint and various other Linux distributions doesn't actually support webcam. In order to get webcam you must use either aMSN or Kmess, both of which bear seriously vile interfaces.

Firefox

Firefox is the default browser for Linut Mint so I tried it out to see if it's any better on the operating system it was designed for but opening a new tab actually crashed it.

So I installed Google Chrome for Linux and it was working fine until one day a tab crashed and the entire system just froze. I had to force quit everything. Then I couldn't even move the cursor so I went for a hard shutdown instead.

Silverlight

I saw Chris Pirillo upload a video showing off a Silverlight application especially designed for integrated usage of Facebook. So I went to the Silverlight website to install it and remembered that Silverlight only works on Windows and Mac OS X. So I went in search of an open source alternative and came across something called Moonlight. I downloaded the installation file and it opened in a file exploration window.

I saw no installation setup file at all.

So I extracted all of the files to another location but there was still no installation setup files to be seen anywhere. There was a README file so I decided to take a look at that but for some reason I couldn't open it. So I went online in search of tips on how to install Moonlight and found I had to use Terminal. So I went into the CLI and typed out all of the commands the instructions told me to type out.

Soon I was faced with an error message.

I saw that the error message said that the Moonlight package was not available for installation so I typed in the location path of the Moonlight installation folder. Then Terminal locked up and crashed. I had to force quit it but then the cursor stopped moving and the screen went black. I had to go for a hard shutdown and when I did so my theme had returned to the default appearance settings.

Music

The default media player is known as Rhythmbox but I was forced into uninstalling this due to the fact that every time I opened it the whole system froze. I tried installing Spotify but because it was running in Wine it couldn't access my sound drivers.

So then I tried installing the Last.fm Scrobbler.

I got the installation files and opened the README without any qualms but the system crashed when I tried following the commands I was instructed to type into the CLI. This led to another hard shutdown.

So then I installed Songbird.

Because I had uninstalled Firefox and replaced it with Chrome nothing seemed to work so I uninstalled. After that, every other media player I installed would appear in The Menu but wouldn't launch when I clicked or double-clicked on them.

Windows Live

I need Windows Live applications for my blogging and for my YouTube channel music video creation/editing. The fact that I cannot use Windows Live applications within Linux is a massive setback for my personal requirements.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is my favourite application for managing my Twitter accounts but when I installed it on Linux it refused to work. According to the error message which appeared Adobe AIR doesn't like my operating system.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling a few times but unfortunately my efforts were futile.

Summary

I could go on but I don't plan to. These are just a few of the reasons I'm making the jump back to Windows XP. I simply cannot wait to be able to indulge in webcam chat with my girlfriend and install any application without any fuss. It really does sound like bliss.

Peace,

Steve.

Coming Soon

Soon I will be posting regarding the current state of Microsoft's advertising.