I write books from my MacBook, and want to switch to linux, help!

[CataclysmicGentlemanAlt]

Hello, im considering buying a laptop for Black Friday, trading in my MacBook Air m1. only issue is, I dont know how to write and publish on linux. I have a linux desktop which I hardly ever use because I use my laptop to write, and for general work (self employed) stuff. what software should I use to write and publish (to kindle direct/ amazon) ?

I asked tux bot but some of the things it recommended im not so sure about. anyone hear a writer who's published books?

for context I publish things as ebooks and as paper books through amazon.

also if anyone wants to help me with this: what laptop is best to buy and flash linux onto ? LMDE6 (although no one has to mention this, I can do my own research too)

thanks for your time. have a nice day

 

[KGIII]

For what it's worth, MacOS is UNIX, more or less. It's in the UNIX family and is even POSIX compliant.

The M1 is still blazing fast compared to Intel and AMD's offerings at that price point. (Yes, it's amazing to be saying that an Apple CPU is cost-efficient!)

We're reaching the point where you can natively run Linux on the M1 architecture. I believe the 6.2 kernel has M1 support. See also the ASHI project.

None of the above really answers your question.

Let's address that.

I think you'll find that stuff like LibreOffice starts to choke when you get past five or six hundred pages (or so I'm told), so many authors on Linux use LaTeX when it comes to formatting a book for publication and write with a basic text editor - sometimes using markdown and then converting it with like pandoc (I think it's called).

If it was me writing a book, I think I'd probably cheat and use one of those fancy online document editors. I'd at least consider it - if it turned out that LibreOffice was indeed choking on large bodies of work. That may no longer be true.

I'm not so sure about the 'direct' bit. You'd have to upload them manually, I'd think. I know of no Linux tools that will upload them for you. You'd need the correct format, but it's easy to switch the format with tools like said pandoc or Calibre.

As for which laptop to buy, I can't speculate. I've recently had good experiences with MSI, but you've already invested in a laptop and M1 resale values aren't what they used to be with M2 and M3 now available.

As you've already spent the money, you might as well stick with what you have - assuming you can. I'd test and see if you can get a live Linux instance running on your laptop before making any decisions.

 

[aeiou]

Hello, im considering buying a laptop for Black Friday, trading in my MacBook Air m1. only issue is, I dont know how to write and publish on linux. I have a linux desktop which I hardly ever use because I use my laptop to write, and for general work (self employed) stuff. what software should I use to write and publish (to kindle direct/ amazon) ?

I asked tux bot but some of the things it recommended im not so sure about. anyone hear a writer who's published books?

for context I publish things as ebooks and as paper books through amazon.

also if anyone wants to help me with this: what laptop is best to buy and flash linux onto ? LMDE6 (although no one has to mention this, I can do my own research too)

thanks for your time. have a nice day

I'm a long time Mac user, I am also an amateur Linux (Kubuntu) user. What writing, publishing software are you using on your Mac? I'm not a writer, however I use LibreOffice Word Processor on my Mac, on my Linux PC and on my Windows 10 PC. Installing Linux isn't difficult, but like everything else there can always be problems. I'm currently using Kubuntu on a Microsoft Laptop Go 2, I installed it myself, which totally wiped out Windows 11. It is no problem for me to reinstall Windows 11, should I ever choose to, though it takes about 5 times longer to install Windows than Ubuntu/Kubuntu.

 

[osprey]

UNIX, and by inference linux, has a different tradition for writing text which has an interesting history that can be found online. Basically, text in this tradition gets written by a text editor, and run through a typesetter to output a final product. On its way to the typesetter there may be preprocessing programs that format text, images, equations and graphics, so basically it's a bunch of programs applied by the user to the text they've prepared from the text editor until they get the outcome they want.

The formatting of the text in the text editor is controlled by "marked up" text, which is basically text itself differentiated from the text of the document, by use of distinguishing features such as dots and slashes and brackets and newlines etc. used in ways that are not commonly used in readable text. The typesetter is able to interpret these to produce the output. One works here in a non-WYSIWYG environment, unlike the word processors like LibreOffice where you see, on the screen, something like the outcome of what is being written as you write or construct it.

Some major programs in this UNIX tradition are troff, (or groff), TeX and LaTeX. There's a very significant learning curve in the use of each of them, which needs research. As an example, the man pages of linux installations are almost universally written in troff. Taking the "ls" command man page as an example, one can see in the original text to create that man page, all the formatting text "markup" elements that form the source code for the troff program to produce in the terminal what one sees with the "man ls" command. Run the following to see it:

zless /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz

These ways of creating texts are now so robust and developed, that they are commonly used in professional publishing, particularly in academic and some industrial settings.

A few classic texts are:
"The TeXbook" by Donald Knuth.
"Unix Text Processing" by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly.
"LaTeX: A Document Preparation System" by Leslie Lamport.

There are various editions of each.