Fitting the battle of life

So, I have a lovely modern shiny laptop that is underpowered with too little storage (hey, it was free from these guys for winning their competition) and a three-year old laptop that makes my room noiser than [text deleted by the PC brigade]. I also have a fscking awesome wonderful new camera (a Canon 450D) that’s producing rather large RAW files that need processing.

I don’t, unfortunately, have much money. The shiny laptop was free, the old laptop a birthday present and the camera also a birthday present. In January, however, I get a nice chunk of student loan in again, and I am working during term so I can save up a little cash.

The problem to solve is, I would quite like to buy a desktop PC for a) working at home on a machine that’s not ridiculously tiny and bad for my fingers to be typing on, b) a nice large screen to see my nice large photos, c) a computer that’s powerful enough to process said photos and d) that isn’t too expensive.

At the moment my decision is between a £799 iMac (because they’re supposed to be good for that kind of thing) and a comparable Dell running Ubuntu (because I like Ubuntu and can do everything for two different values of free with GIMP and ufraw instead of acquiring buying Lightroom/Aperture/Photoshop etc). I haven’t ever had a desktop of my own, and am not really sure I know what I’m looking for. Any suggestions, tips or warnings (and hatemail for the iMac comment), please do let me know down there in the comment box. I won’t be buying until the New Year, but it would be good to have an idea of what I’m looking for before I start looking!

[Updated]:

Dell computer:
Looking at Dell’s site, I can get a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 gig RAM, 320GB hard drive with 128MB ATI card for £310. Monitor I’d buy separately – could probably get cheaper, as with wireless adaptor. Add another, larger hard drive myself, and I’m sorted. Does that sound good enough?

In repsonse to Sionide’s post, this is how tidy my desktop is at the moment. Obviously quite clear – I only use it to save files temporarily, such as e-mail attachments that will ultimately be sent back to the sender and then filed away in the appropriate folder in /home, screenshots or downloaded stuff (such as the mail-trends folder, which I’ll blog about soon).

The one thing that sometimes annoys me is the placement of mounted media – I like to have drives and CDs in the bottom right-hand corner, but can’t work out how to set this as a default area…any clues let me know!

That’s the way, uhuh, uhuh, I like it…two seconds to find my old .theme folder backed up on external hard drive (from before the reinstall), half a second to copy it all over, two seconds to change theme in System>Preferences>Appearance. How to get your desktop looking great in under five seconds. Sorted. Black-white icons, black window borders, darkilouche controls and a lovely nasa wallpaper.

I think it’s quite a good combination, certainly better than the default. I also have my panels trimmed to 23 pixels instead of 24 (it makes a difference! honest!), and the mouse pointers changed to whiteglass. I love customisation :)

I just can’t seem to get a desktop I like at the moment. I’ve tried different icon sets, different themes, different wallpapers, combinations of all three, and still can’t get a final one settled on. I’ve trawled gnome-look.org for the ‘right’ look for me. I’ve tried dark themes, picking colours myself and even (heavens no!) the default Ubuntu theme.

I don’t want my computer to look like XP, Vista or Mac OSX, which means half the themes on gnome-look are unsuitable. Nor do I want the default Ubuntu look, being bored of it after about two seconds. At the moment I have the default look + different wallpaper + transparent panels, but the window decorations don’t fit with this.

It was all easier on Windows. There were three themes, as far as I remember, only two of which anyone ever used (the silvery one and the blue one; there was also the ‘classic’ style). Now, with appearance not limited to tweaking around in the registry (which I was never going to do), I am spoilt for choice.

How I yearn for the days when choices were made for me.