Back when I was a kid, if you wanted to have a computer in your home you had pretty much two options – the Commodore 64, or the Apple IIe. My cousins had the Commodore, but my elementary school had Apples. When I grew up, the college had IBM based machines that ran Windows. Like many my age, that was the single choice of operating system for quite some time until Mac’s OSX revitalized the Mac option. Since I had worked at a research lab after college, I became impressed with Unix, and then Linux. As such, the new OSX was pretty attractive since it was built on the solid architecture used on *nix systems.
So I switched to Mac around 1999 and stuck around for a good 15 years, very happy with the new productivity it provided.
Now, however, I’m using Linux for our work in the NGO sector, and it has been a fun journey trying to replicate some of the functionality of the Mac on this free, open source platform. This little blog is an attempt to highlight some of those discoveries in case others would like to give it a try.