I am quite amazed at how quickly the Linux community takes the best of Mac OS-X and implements it for multiple flavors of the operating system and does its best to tackle the 25,920 possible combinations (12 x 12 x 12 x 5 x 3) <grin>.

They may not get it right the first time and in some cases they may never get it right (but that is usually because the target audience is so small). But the infinite monkeys theory is alive in well in the world of open source and these moneys are smart !

The Mac OS-X showed the world the convenience and fun of the “dock” and 3-D desktops, and “cover flow” and “fan out” and “time machine”. the Linux community was quick to create Avant-Window-Manager, compiz-fusion, and TimeVault.

I still fight with my Linux machines nearly every day – I still can’t get my Thinkpad to suspend and the Blackberry tether over USB as a modem – even with hours and hours of reading and experimenting. I trust they will work one day. Still, I like my Linux laptop. Which what I’ve learned, I am sure I could recreate my new work environments on Windows by why bother – pretty soon, I will have found solutions for my regular necessities (like a decent replacement for “MS Project”). I don’t miss the other office suite programs. My person mail is handled nicely by Thunderbird – especially since Google added IMAP for Gmail – and for work, I can live with the misbehaving nature of Lotus Notes 8 on Linux – it is their first release so they deserve some slack.

I still keep my “Linux lists” such as “things you can’t do on Linux”, “things only a Linux god can do”, “things that should be easy but are not”, … you get the idea.

Linux takes a line from Mary_Schmich’s column published in the Chicago Tribune – “Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements” – in other words, enjoy the results of your tweaking, our python scripts, your bash, your numerous cuts-n-pastes from blogs and forums. Backup your system often. Revert when you’ve made a mess. Assemble the good parts and “show them your Linux” !

So it was a big (and welcome) surprise to find not one but two groups within the company putting together distributions of the IBM desktop products for Ubuntu. One version has everything an IBMer needs and loads it is a single easy (walk away till it’s done) package. The other let’s you pick and choose – Lotus Notes 8, Sametime 7.5.1, the Lotus Mobile Connect client, Tivoli Storage Manager, and a whole lot more. There’s even a cool corporate theme. (Typically, I’m not one to use a branded theme but for all the work these groups have done, I’ll give it a try and give them some well deserved credit.)

I know what I’ll be doing one evening this weekend !

Like a lot of software I have evaluated over the past few years, I start out trying every bell and whistle and as time goes by, I spend less and less time on the “neat stuff” and just use the parts that make me more productive. Notes 8 has been no exception.

I really like the integrated feed reader. I was a little frustrating that it was forgetting my read-marks and would show me old stuff as unread. I think some of it is how various feeds report being new/old/updated. Eventually, I stopped using the feed reader. The same became true for the integrated Sametime feature. My favorite feature of the integrated version (nearly identical to the Sametime 7.5.1 release) is the “save chats to mail”. This is great for me since it means I can use Notes full text index to find my correspondence – regardless of it being an email thread or a chat. However, I had stability issues and I didn’t like that chat history didn’t show in the chat window when using the “save chats to mail” was enabled.

In the end, I mostly just use the core Notes 8 features.

Good news for old farts like me – “Notes 8 (Basic)”. It’s the Notes client we love – updated and healthy as ever. If you run the “basic” version of the Notes 8 client, you lose support for plug-ins, and the Integrated Sametime functionality is not as rich as with the new Eclipse based Notes client. Also, “basic” is a Windows-only offer.

I’ll miss enough of the extra functionality in the Eclipse based Notes 8 client to switch back eventually but it is great to have the option and can make the choice for myself.

I had a few hiccups but they were my own doing – I had a very customized mail template. A little “relinquishing of control” and all was good.

Now I am looking at the UI and pining for just a little more control of the colors and the formatting. The two themes – “Notes 8″ and “system” lead me to believe a “personal preference” is achievable. However, attempting to edit hte CSS left me flat.

I now pine for a theme generator. Here’s hoping someone in the developer community either starts writing a tool, a series of cool themes, or a noob tutorial on the subject … hint hint <grin>.

Of course, you could easily have just the Lotus logo, the IBM logo, or … you make the choice. Without the Lotus Notes 8 portion, I would not be surprised to see it used for other IBM products <grin>.