ubuntu.png Back in March, I wrote about my first experience with Ubuntu. Although it was a very pleasant one, I kept my Vista installed and couldn’t convince my wife to switch over. That meant that every time I got home, Vista was running. More often than not, I’d be too lazy to boot the PC back into Ubuntu and so I just ended up using more Vista than Ubuntu.

Well that’s not entirely fair, I would sometimes boot into Vista myself to use Photoshop. I know that Ubuntu comes loaded with GIMP, its own graphic editor with features comparable to Photoshop, but I was not at all interested in learning a new graphic editor when I had a perfectly good “paid for” one that I was already proficient with.

That was the last string holding me back. So far, I was able to do everything I wanted on Ubuntu that I was able to do on Vista and then some! Sure some games didn’t work perfectly, but the majority worked fine with WINE (a Windows emulator) with a little internet research! Some even worked without any extra tweaks! Otherwise I was able to browse, use any office application I wanted with Open Office, watch videos, play music, burn CDs/DVDs, manage my photos, connect to my MSN messenger through Pidgin, download torrents, and many more tasks and most without having to install anything! Ubuntu was great right out of the proverbial box! But having to boot Windows every time I wanted to do some advanced image-editing really annoyed me and, combined with my wife’s stubbornness ;) , kept me on Vista most of the time.

Then it happen. It came as a shock since I’m usually so careful, but I somehow got something from the net that made my Vista stop booting. With all of the other issues Vista had been giving me, that was the last straw. No, I was not interested in re-installing Vista and starting over, I decided to go fully Ubuntu cold turkey. Since I already had Ubuntu installed and running flawlessly, all that required was learning GIMP on Ubuntu and calling it a day.

That was until I realized I was missing the most obvious solution! I could install Photoshop on Ubuntu using WINE! Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Every time I’ve  heard of WINE before it was used to install a game since Linux pretty much has open-source versions of every application out there. I still felt stupid for not thinking about this before!

My Photoshop 7 (yeah I know it’s old but I’m not spending any $$$ on a newer version) installed so easily I didn’t even have to go online to search for instructions or anything! Click on setup.exe, enter the CD Key, click next a couple of times and voila! Didn’t even have to restart the PC! It uses all of the fonts installed in Ubuntu and all of the features work flawlessly! All but one, I can’t drag-and-drop any images into Photoshop to open them, but I can live without that.

So there you have it. I was dancing around the edge but I’ve finally taken the plunge! From this point on I am 100% fully Ubuntu and proud!

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