Just a quick update on my #noapple efforts. Except for one lapse I’ve not been regularly using OS X since last summer. For the last several months my desktop of choice has been Gnome 3 on Debian testing (wheezy).

Due to the tight integration with the rest of the desktop and its ability to integrate well with our middleware solution (SOGo) I was using Evolution mail. I had heard it could be buggy, but for weeks I had no problems, plus I liked the fact that it was easy to play sound files in-line without launching another app (which I have to do with Thunderbird). Our Asterisk PBX sends voicemails as attachments.

But something happened after the last update and Evolution kept crashing. It was sporadic at first, but then it happened so often I’d launch it via the Gnome debugger. Surprisingly, when I did that it was stable, but after awhile it would die even in the debugger. I did a search on the error and found out that it had been reported as a bug, but it didn’t seem to have any activity on a fix.

Since I can’t live without e-mail, I needed something else. I’d seen some interesting things about Ubuntu 12.04 so I thought I might give that a shot. Of course, there must be something wrong we me, as the businessman wants something stable that just works and the geek wants the new shiny, and here I was willing to run another testing desktop.

Lucky for the businessman, the 12.04 Alpha 2 installer kept dying on me.

The reason I left 11.10 was that SOGo did not have a frontend for the version of Thunderbird that came with it. However, that has now changed, so I went back.

I missed Ubuntu.

If you have been a longtime OS X user, Ubuntu with Unity is about the closest you can get to that experience (pre-Lion of course since Lion sucks). I had everything up and running in about an hour, and over the weekend I based my other two machines and put 11.10 on them (still didn’t fix my line-in audio problem on my iMac, however).

So I’m back to drinking the Ubuntu Kool-aid, which is cool. What I love about open source is the plethora of choices.