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Status report: to what extent has the migration from Windows to Linux taken place?

As at mid-May2019 - ~10 weeks since a change to the test environment - it's about time to document the status of the migration from Windows to Linux.

Successful path to migration found, a bonus is that the path is bi-directional

Linux Mint, WPS Office, GPS Prune, Google Earth and XNView are successfully replicating their functionality in the Windows environment.

The changes to the data are successfully read and updated within the Windows environment.  For these apps, the path to migration is achieved, is bi-directional.  For these apps, mission accomplished.

Path to migration is visible, but not yet reliable enough to count as a success

gscan2pdf has been found over two months to be unreliable, with predictable crashes upon a particular instruction of post-scanning processing.  This could be gscan2pdf itself, or any number of the subsidiary programs it invokes.  It is still worth persistence.  NAPS2 for Windows is still the more reliable app.

Path to migration is obstructed by apps which are incompatible or otherwise unusable

PDF browsing and annotation

Of all the functionality that has gone wrong, it is the simple, basic, fundamental task of reading and annotating PDF files.  An initial test in May2018 found that Foxit for Linux and Okular broadly failed to meet the base requirements met by Foxit for Windows, but there seems to be few alternatives in the Linux environment, so a formal test-of-use of the three PDF browsers is required to establish where issues exist.  The control case is Foxit for Windows.

Path to migration not yet tested

  • GenoPro.
  • Replacement for Thunar File Manager (no filter; Linux Mint provides Catfish, but this is largely keyboard-inaccessible, therefore largely unusable).
  • Connecting to a VPN.
  • MP3Tag
  • PDFill (subject to persistence with gscan2pdf).
  • Duplicati 2


End of document.

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