Orca Flotta

Linux Software for Writers

Luna asked, Orcs delivers! Here are some snippets I found in this new fangled thingamajig, teh interwebz, which might be of help in sourcing the coolest writing aids for aspiring bestselling authors:

writertech
Some good helpful hints on here.

The first sort of tool the good Aaron suggests comes included in each and every Linux distro. The simple but reliabale Text Editor. These are predominatly made for coding and bugfixing and such geeky shit but you can also use them to just type words. Some of them even offer some sort of basic luxuries like spellcheckers and line counters. Here, let me show you Pluma, the text editor which comes with Manjaro MATE:

pluma
Nice, eh?

 

Now Word Processors, you know ’em, right? They are available in every form of awkwardness, either totally overblown or underequipped. Not easy to find just the right one. This one here I just hatehatehate:

abiword
I can’t even define a DIN A4 or your American letter format as standard in Abiword. WTF?

 

But basically Abi is the just the poorer little cousin of Office monsters like MS Office, Libre/Open Office and the likes. Just less complete and guaranteed to miss exactly the function you’d need right now.

Even less exciting is Ted, a program I just found in that article:

ted
Enough stuff to play with but no distractions, I guess I’ll keep Ted on my machine.

Last bu not least, for the truly adventurous and highly geeky writer babe – so not really suited for you and me – there are Desktop Publishing softwares available. Uiuiuiiii, very complex stuff, way above my noggin wares like Scribus or LaTex/Lyx. I won’t even install that shit on my machine out if fear I might get lost in it. But those things might come in handy if you decide to publish yourself, write eBooks or scientific works.

But what am I babbling here. Just read the interesting and informative article and find out yourself if you can find something suitable in Linux. Anyway, if you decide to install a Ubuntu based OS like Mint or Ubuntu you’ll find well sorted online “stores” where you will find a rich plethora of all kinds of softwares, more or less sorted  and always easy installable with one-click functionality.

 

7 comments

  1. Thank you, Orca. You just wiped out my last excuse for not switching to Linux on my laptop workhorse. Nothing left to whinge about, so by the end of the first day of 2016 SLT, I will do it! Cheers!

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    • Mhm, Orca The Destroyer of Dreams … and lame excuses. 🙂 I was always the black sheep of the family and a huge disappointment for my elders, LOL.

      Congratz on your bold decision btw, tell me how it goes, which distro and desktop you choose and why. And please don’t make the mistake and compare your new Linux to Windows. It is a different OS afterall adn just because we use it with mouse and keyboard as well, doesn’t make it Windows … fortunately. \o/

      Oh, have you seen, Trap seems to like that Writer software too? BTW, she uses Linux at work so you can always ask her if you run into trubbels. 😉

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    • Couldn’t find pyRoom, not in pacman and not even in the AUR, no matter how I spelled it. But I installed FocusWriter … and don’t like it a bit. Now I never had problems writing in any kind of normal word processor since I’m able to blend out the surroundings while my heroines are going thru the actions and feels of my story. 😉

      And, NO, you don’t download MATE as such. You download a Linux distro that uses MATE as desktop environment, if you wanna use MATE that is. I like it, most younger and sexier Linux users hate it because it looks and feels oldfashioned. They want a more polished desktop, streamlined and without much options to customize it. In other words, they expect and actually love flat icons and the whole look and feel of a smartphone screen. Or a monster like KDE.

      I always found XFCE and Cinnamon to be good compromises.

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