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Comment by mojombo | Hacker News Reader

These are both fair points, and we'd like to offer free Sublime Text licenses to recipients of our laptops, I just haven't had time yet to explore the best way to make that happen. Once Atom has a competent Linux version, we'll likely switch to installing that instead, as it's open source but still very friendly for novice developers.

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Why not just use Gedit or Geany or any of the other many free software text editors available on Linux?

Probably the same reason they're using Ubuntu and Chrome: the alternatives, while free, aren't fashionable enough.

Except Ubuntu and Chrome are both really good products while still being fashionable.

I'd use Sublime any day of the week over Gedit even if it wasn't "cool"

Gedit is pretty bare-bones and not really a programmers editor despite a few features in that direction.

Geany, on the other hand is everything a beginner needs and without proprietary concerns.

Check this out for a nice Ubuntu package of it: https://launchpad.net/~webupd8team/+archive/ubuntu/atom

You probably don't want to depend on a PPA, but it's a place to start.

I like atom, but the experience on Ubuntu can be quite frustrating, especially if you use Unity, which is the case here on these laptops.

Right now I cannot even launch it. I didn't install it from the PPA though, but from a recent commit.

Huh, a bunch of us at Canonical use Atom with Unity, I think you might be missing the .desktop file if you're pulling it from github? Make sure you have one for atom in /usr/share/applications. I took a quick scan of the github repo and didn't see one, so you might want to just grab the .desktop and icon from the PPA package.

I've used atom since it was open sourced and really like many of the features it offers. But there is an issue with the mouse cursor disappearing when hitting the ALT key described here https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/2122 and the launch problem https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/3190

I've never used a .desktop file for atom and had no problems launching it until a recent update from the master repo. Guess I'll try installing the PPA package to see if that works.

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