Screen resolution
The Yoga 2 has a magnificent screen resultion of 3200x1800. It sold itself with its vivid, crystal clear display. But there's a down-side: many applications are not set up to deal with such luxury. This leads to unreadably small text and mangled UI elements:Annoying.
Ubuntu
I decided to not make it dual-boot but stick with the pre-installed Windows 8.1 and escape to Ubuntu through VirtualBox.The reasons for this were:
- I need to cooperate on Microsoft Office documents for work, and office compatibility is still not good enough on Ubuntu.
- Almost every application I use on Ubuntu is available for Windows 8 as well. (Which confirms my theory that OSs will become irrelevant.)
Configuring this was partly straightforward with some tweaks:
- I seemed to have messed up my confuguration to the point where Ubuntu only ran in 800x600 resolution and I could not open the mini-toolbar in any way. This was ' fixed' by recreating the virtual machine with the same virtual disk (thus resetting the configuration).
- I could not make symbolic links under Ubuntu. This turned out to be a feature instead of a bug. I haven't been able to get the workaround working...
Free applications
To keep a good tradition going, here's the list of free apps I installed on my new laptop, with some thoughts thrown in:- Programmer's notepad for editing text files, including the textutil add-on for sorting)
- Classic Shell to create the classic start menu
- Chrome for browsing the web, with some extensions:
- virtualbox to run Ubuntu on
- ubuntu for Unix tooling
- Filezilla for FTP access
- CubicExplorer for bowsing my files with tabs, but without panes.
- TeamViewer to provide remote support to my mother (in law).
- 7-zip for compression
- DiskCryptor for encryption of my data
- openoffice for editing documents that I don't have to share with others
- CutePDF to print any document to PDF
- Sumatra PDF Reader to read PDF files
- Gramps for managing my genealogy data
- gimp for graphics editing
- audacity for audio editing
- Image resizer for windows for basic graphics operations from the explorer
- WinDirStat to get an idea of where my drive space went
- audacious to play music
- Cobian Backup to make backups
- Burrrn to burn music from playlists to CDs
- WinMerge to compare files
- WorkRave RSI prevention, because I close its window without even noticing, thus only making myself hastier
- WatchGuard to open VPN connection, because I haven't had to use that connection lately.
- RawTherapy for photo editing, beacause I am not taking that many photos at the moment.
- Clover to add tabs to the file explorer, because it didn't work properly (maybe to do with Windows 8.1). Replaced by CubicExplorer.
- SublimeText for text editing, because it is just to bloated and complicated. Replaced by Programmer's notepad.
- TrueCrypt because its development and support is discontinued. Replaced by DiskCryptor.
- file history because it was to complicated to make it work properly (it only works on libraries), so I didn't feel in control at all. Replaced by Cobian Backup.
- winamp because its development is discontinued and it didn't play well with my image resolution of 3000x1800. Replaced by Audacious.
- Cygwin for Unix tooling, because I now run Ubuntu through VirtualBox.
- back in time for backups, because it is not available for Windows. Replaced by Cobian Backup.
Anyway, I am up and running again, with a configuration to my taste, without any illegal software copies.