so with a bit of money i got for christmas, i bought a used netbook really cheap off of craigslist. i got it for a couple of reasons, primarily for travel and when we need a second computer around the house. i also got it to experiment a little bit with linux. i’ve been wanting to do that for a while. i saw that tim had recently moved to linux and that got me thinking about that a bit more recently.
what i’m finding so far is that i can do just about everything that i need to do on a day to day basis using linux. i can use open office or google docs to write. i can use prezi to do my presentations. i can use biblia.com to do a bit of my day in day out biblical studies stuff for church and personal reading. i can obviously blog (which i am actually deciding to do from time to time again ;-)).
however, the one thing i can’t do is my intensive biblical studies work requiring searches, especially using one of the corpus linguistics programs i’m currently using for some research. and, that is because i must use programs that are pretty well tied to either osx or windows (which i run in parallels). so for that, i’ll continue to use my macbook.
but overall i’m really happy with the netbook and linux for a second computer to do some basic work tasks. i think it will be especially helpful on days when i’m out and about adjuncting, when i know i won’t be doing any of my serious writing. the smaller keyboard is taking a bit of getting use to though. i’m avoiding caps for because i haven’t really gotten accustomed to where the shift keys are just yet.
My Windows XP netbook is essentially my main computer now. It runs everything fine and is convenient. Although I do have one with a pretty big screen for a netbook, otherwise I may not survive.
i’m pretty addicted so far.