The Same Experience

Posted by CPUFreak91 on July 29th, 2008 filed in (K)Ubuntu, Macintosh, Project Difficulty: Medium, Web Stuff

Recently I’ve been working on narrowing the gap between Mac OS X and Kubuntu. Since Mac OS X isn’t too configurable, I’ve modified Kubuntu to look more like its cousin. Visually I’ve achieved narrowed the gap with Avant Window Navigator (for the dock), KDE4 for visual effects and “Expose”, but there was still something missing.  I wasn’t getting the same experience on both operating systems.

This all changed when I met Flock. Flock is a modification of Mozilla Firefox that is more social oriented. Flock provides a Twitter client, Facebook client, RSS reader, integrates nicely with Webmail, and even displays your Del.icio.us bookmarks when you type URLs into the navigation bar.

Normally I’d turn down a Gecko-based rendering engine’d browser because I like KHTML/WebKit better. However, I’ll get rid of my fanboy tendencies when I meet something truly useful. Flock is my Killer Cross-Platform App. Sure, I could wait until Konqueror 4 comes out for Mac, but Flock is more useful.

There was a quirks I had to iron out thoguh. I downloaded the Flock 2 beta, and tried to get flash to work on it in Linux. Didn’t work. After much hair pulling and combing the web, I realized Kubuntu was providing the npwrapper implementation of the 32-bit flash library to work with my 64-bit browsers. Because I had the 32-bit version of Flock (I need to find me the 64-bit version) it was choking on the “64-bit” Flash libraries. I went to Adobe’s site, downloaded Flash 9 for Linux, extracted the library, and copied it to ~/.flock/plugins.

Now I have the same experience on both OSes. There are a few killer apps, like Unity on OS X, and KDE Linux experience itself (yes, that’s my killer “app”) on Kubuntu that I can never get to work on the other OS, but that’s nothing but a quibble. When I want to watch a video, I fire up VLC, on either OS. When I want to chat with someone I fire up, Konversation (on Kubuntu) or Colloquy (on OS X) which function and look fairly similarly. Music is a bit rough, Amarok on Kubuntu and iTunes on OS X, but once I stop being lazy and download the Mac builds (they’re only in torrent form right now ), my music experience will be the same also.

Why this need for a similar experience? Why make a Grany Smith Apple look like a Red Delicious? Humans (well, maybe just me) like things that are familiar to them. Sure I’ve been using KDE for almost two years now, and OS X for over one year, but the drastic change of environment when I rebooted irriated me somewhat. Now when I want to use my computer I just use it. I no longer debate which OS to boot into based on my aesthetical mood. It Just Works (TM), and i don’t have to Think Different (TM) ;).