Debian defaulted to GNOME when it installed, so I've been using GNOME for no good reason, although I've now got a good list of reasons never to recommend GNOME to anyone but the most masochistic.
I want to do the incredibly complicated task of "open file in a text editor and not a program that can't actually handle it."
Right Click on the file, try "Open With." Oops, the option I want (text editor) is listed twice. And neither work. Of course. So how do I remove these broken options?
I found this article to be fairly helpful when it came to installing Sun's JRE under Debian Linux.
However, there was one step that I needed to add that was missing:
apt-get remove java-gcj-compat
Without that step, the GCJ Java compatibility scripts remained, conflicting with Sun's Java. Since that package was installed by default with my Debian Testing install, I expect other people will run into the same problem.
So I recently switched my work laptop over to Linux, because Windows XP was running incredibly slowly. Now I know that the usual cause of "Windows XP is running incredibly slowly" is simply "spyware" but in this case, it's "corporate required spyware" (Norton Antivirus, asset tracking software, etc.). It's slowing the thing to a freaking crawl.
It turns out that there's an official way you can get out of having to run the asset software and all that other corporate software: run Linux. (This also gets you out of having a supported PC, but I can cope.)
So I installed Debian Testing on it. And the laptop boots much, much faster now. (We're talking a good two minutes to load everything versus something like 20 minutes under Windows. Not kidding.) It runs faster. About the only thing slower is that, for some reason, GNOME feels slower than Windows. (KDE too, but Debian defaulted to GNOME, and I haven't decided to change it yet. Eclipse and Firefox both use GTK+, so, I'm basically just using GNOME software anyway.) But it's really not that big a deal, because minor things like compiling and running the software are faster.
This may sound kinda silly, but it's possible to make it so that the middle mouse doesn't do what it does in X - namely, paste whatever you selected.
The problem with Firefox is that, frequently, this means you'll be going to some random website. When you type random text into the URL bar, Firefox will run a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search on it - effectively taking you to whatever the first result is.
This is kinda cool, in that you can actually find the right website you want by doing this occasionally (try "news for nerds" some time), but if you've got something random selected (text you just deleted, some weird command), you'll wind up going someplace completely random.
So most modern systems have the ability to make noise. One of the most annoying instances is the stupid, freaking, bell. I don't need to hear a beep most of the time. Fortunately, there are a couple of simple ways to turn the more annoying offenders off in Linux:
In ~/.bashrc:
export LESS=-q # Don't ring a bell when scrolling hits the edge
