Should I begin this blog post, as I so often do, briefly summarizing parts of past blog posts that are relevant? Probably not; anyone who is really interested would have read those posts and anyone who isn't really interested... isn't really interested. Am I going to do it anyway? Of course I am. Will I ever escape my unfortunate compulsion toward self-referentially criticizing my own blogging patterns, and perhaps even go so far as to actually consider changing them? Maybe. Maybe. But not today. Not today.

So last year in a post about the purpose of the Wongery I wrote that while of course the main purposes of the Wongery are to share my invented worlds and to encourage others to create and share their own, maybe a tertiary purpose of the Wongery is to encourage the use of open licenses, and that to that end I was myself moving toward using more open-source software. However, I admitted at the time that I was not, or at least not yet, exclusively using open-source software; I still used Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Suite, and I still used the Windows operating system. I did, though, remark in another blog post months later that my disgust at Adobe's embrace of generative "AI" was giving me further motivation to finally abandon Adobe for open-source equivalents of its offerings.

That didn't happen immediately, however, because I was used to the Adobe applications, and while there may be open-source software that would fulfill my needs, it would take time to learn how to use it. But it has now happened; last month I let my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription lapse. Honestly, this was accelerated because of my (all too usual) financial difficulties; I wasn't really comfortable with Inkscape and Krita yet, and had I the money to spare to continue paying for the subscription, I would have kept it for at least a few more months. But on the other hand, I had planned to eventually cancel the subscription anyway, so I also didn't feel as strongly motivated as I otherwise would have to find a way to scrape up the funds for it; the subscription isn't that much money, after all, and if I'd really wanted to I could have found a way to scrimp elsewhere and keep it going. But the combination of my financial strain and my determination to eventually move to use of open source software caused me to break ways with Adobe earlier than either factor would have alone.

Likewise, I have entirely stopped using Microsoft Office, in favor of LibreOffice. Here my finances didn't play a röle; while the Adobe subscription was charged monthly, I had an annual subscription to Microsoft 365 that was already paid up through October, so continuing to use Microsoft Office wouldn't cost me anything further until then. But this was a much easier transition, since LibreOffice works much more similarly to Microsoft Office than Inkscape does to Illustrator or Krita to Photoshop, so there was much less of a learning curve.

That does, however, leave one big piece of proprietary, closed-source software that I still use daily^[1]. Wait, no, two, but I'll touch on the other later. The biggest one is, of course, Microsoft Windows. But I've taken the first steps in changing that, as well.

I mentioned in a footnote in my previous blog post that when I recently ordered a new laptop, I decided to order one with Linux pre-installed rather than Windows. For the same price, I could have ordered a laptop with either Ubuntu or Mint—two different "flavors" of Linux—and after glancing over some webpages laying out the differences between the two, I decided on Mint; I am still not sure whether this was the right decision, or the wrong decision, or whether actually it wouldn't have mattered much which I chose and I overthought it^[2]. Regardless, a few days ago the new laptop^[3] arrived, and I haven't had much chance to use it yet (being still in the midst of the month-and-a-bit of unpleasantness mentioned in the previous post), but at least I've poked about on it and tried to install the software I'd need.

LibreOffice, indeed, came preinstalled, as did Firefox, my preferred web browser. Blender, Inkscape, and Krita did not, but were easily installed through the "Software Manager". A few other programs I wanted to install didn't show up in the Software Manager, but I was able to install them through downloads and instructions on their own sites. There are, however, a few programs of which I either made frequent use or intended to use for some Wongery content that are, apparently, not available on Linux.

One of those is my preferred text editor, Notepad++. (I am in fact writing this blog post on Notepad++, as I have all my past blog posts—I'm not writing this blog post on my new Linux laptop, but on an older, more portable but considerably less powerful Windows laptop.) As much as I like Notepad++, it is, alas, Windows-only. Nevertheless, I'm sure there are plenty of good Linux text editors out there; for the moment I've just been using a text editor that came pre-installed, but perhaps as I continue to use that laptop I'll look for another text editor with more features. Similar notes apply to WampServer, a development environment tool I use to set up local versions of the Wongery and other websites so I can work on them without affecting the online version of the site^[4] until all the changes are tested and ready to go live. But for Linux there's WampServer's cross-platform predecessor XAMPP, which does pretty much the same thing.

A few other programs that I wanted to use to create content for some of the Wongery subspaces, however, have no such straightforward Windows equivalents. Although I haven't put them up on the site yet (mainly because I want to figure out how to get instructions working for them first), I've been digitally creating Lego models of some Wongery creatures and places for the Buildspace... but I've been making them in BrickLink Studio, which has Windows and macOS builds available but not Linux. However, I found another digital Lego-model-building program, LeoCAD, that is available for Linux, so I installed that. (I haven't really had time to try it out yet, though, so I can't speak to how easy it's going to be to use.) Similarly, I'd (barely) started creating some content for the Assetspace with RPG Maker MZ... which also has no Linux client available. However, there exists a utility, Wine, that allows Windows programs to be run from Linux, so I gave that a try. At first it didn't seem to entirely work; I was able to install RPG Maker MZ but when I tried to run it I got only a blank window; but it turned out I just had to install another utility called Wine Gecko and then it seemed to work fine.

(Come to think of it, maybe I could have run BrickLink Studio under Wine, too. But then again, if I'm trying to move toward using more open-source software, it makes more sense to use LeoCAD anyway, since LeoCAD is open source and BrickLink, while free, isn't.)

That left just one major stumbling block toward my using Linux for pretty much everything I had been doing on Windows... that being Microsoft OneDrive. This is, of course, the second "big piece of proprietary, closed-source software that I still use daily" I alluded to in a previous paragraph. (While BrickLink Studio and RPG Maker MZ of course aren't open source either, they're also not programs that I use every day.) I keep all my most important and most frequently used files on OneDrive, not so much for the purpose of backing them up as so that I can easily use them on multiple computers—both on my desktop when I'm at home and on a laptop when I'm not. This includes my files pertaining to the Wongery, the very text file into which I am writing these words among them. I have intended to find an alternative to OneDrive and to sever entirely my dependence on Microsoft products, but, as I said before, my Microsoft 365 subscription is paid up through October, so I have felt no great urgency to do so, and accordingly have not done so yet.

But while OneDrive comes with Windows, and apparently there are OneDrive apps for macOs, Android, and iOS, there is no Linux client available. Or at least there is no official Linux client, but apparently independent developers have made unofficial applications that allow OneDrive to be used with Linux. I installed one such application, onedriver, and it... more or less works. I can access my files stored on OneDrive from the Linux laptop, but not readily; I often have to wait some time after opening a folder until its contents become visible and I can select a file. And onedriver apparently does not play well with XAMPP virtual hosts, for whatever reason; I have the folders for my local copies of the Wongery and other websites in a OneDrive directory, but, while this has worked fine for running virtual hosts with Wampserver on a Windows machine, on my Linux laptop I have not been able to get it to function. According to the error log this seems to be because "Document Root does not exist", even though I have no trouble navigating to the directory that I set as the Document Root, or "because search permissions are missing on a component of the path", but I checked every level of the path to make sure it has the correct permissions. My hypothesis is that it must have something to do with onedriver implementing the OneDrive folder as a mounted file system, but if so I'm not sure what if anything can be done about it.

In any case, eventually I just copied the folders with the files for the site to a different location outside of the OneDrive folder, and I was able to get the virtual host running then. It's not an ideal solution, because the files in that folder won't automatically be synced with the files on my other computers, which was the whole point of having them in OneDrive in the first place, but at least it works as a stopgap. And I'm not sure it's worth the trouble to seek a more long-term solution, because for one thing, I'm not likely to be working on the site on that computer much after the next two weeks—after which this very unpleasant month-and-a-bit will be over and I'll be back home and be able to work on my desktop—and for another, I'll only be using OneDrive for another few months anyway. In fact, I may start looking for a replacement sooner. Frankly, OneDrive has been glitchy and unreliable enough I won't be sad to see the back of it; I won't miss having to repeatedly reset OneDrive on one of my laptops and then wait overnight for it to sync all my files again.

Anyway aside from the issue with OneDrive, I've been finding Linux... honestly a little clunky and finicky, but that's probably mostly because I'm not used to it and haven't learned ways to do things more easily; after all, I've been using Windows for thirty years, and Linux for five days. For instance, those programs that weren't installed through the Software Manager don't show up in the start menu, so I have to run them from the terminal. But I'm sure there's a simple way to add programs to the start menu; I've had enough else to do I haven't really made time to look into it. Furthermore, even in its sleep mode the computer uses enough power that doesn't stay charged long, and unless I shut it down completely it goes from fully charged to dead overnight. This, however, is likely more a hardware issue than a software issue; no doubt this laptop, being significantly more powerful than my older laptops, also uses significantly more power. Where this does relate to Linux is that I found and followed instructions online for how to enable a hibernation function for Linux Mint that would presumably better conserve the computer's power, but they seemed to have no effect; the promised "hibernate" button did not appear on the shutdown menu. Until one time it did, but then it was gone again the next time, and then when I tried to invoke hibernation through the command line an error message disclosed the apparent culprit: "Not enough suitable swap space for hibernation available on compatible block devices and file systems". Which is odd, as the laptop's drive has 888.7 gigabytes available, which I would think should be more than enough swap space, but presumably the settings allow only a small part of this to actually be used as the swap space—but I assume there's a way to change these settings, so this too should be a solvable issue.

(Also, I'm finding it a bit of an annoyance that the function key and the left control key on the keyboard are reversed from what I'm used to, with the function key occupying the lower left corner of the keyboard and the control key to its right, so that I keep pressing the former when I intend to press the latter... but that of course again is a hardware issue, not a software issue, and has nothing to do with Linux. And I suppose as I keep using this laptop I'll get used to it.)

In any case, as I also mentioned in the foresaid footnote to my previous post, I intend to buy a new hard drive for my desktop, and to install Linux on it... I'll keep the existing hard drive as a secondary drive, at least until it follows through on its constant threats to fail, but I'll boot from the Linux drive. Which means that what I learn using Linux on this laptop will transfer over and apply when it comes time to use it on my desktop as well. And which also means, I suppose, that I have all the more reason to prioritize finding a replacement for OneDrive, since the issues with using OneDrive through onedriver will be less bearable on my desktop than they are on my laptop...

Anyway, while all of this may tie in to a possible tertiary purpose of the Wongery, the main purpose of the Wongery, again, is the sharing of imaginary worlds... so I really ought to get on that. I swear I'll have some new articles up soon.