Well, what can I say, it’s Linux. I have been a long time windows user (say 13 years and you’ll have it just about right, right back to windows 3.11) so I have nearly always been focused on the latest and greatest of Microsoft, that was until about 2 years ago. That was the first time I properly used a mac for a long period of time, It felt right. There were minor things about Mac OS X (10.2 or 10.3 if I remember rightly) that made it different from windows, the metal texture on the finder windows, the dock. It’s a completely different, and in many ways better computing experience. This opened me up to trying other OSs.

This inadvertently led to Linux. about a year ago I decided to download Open SUSE 10 after getting a book called Linux in Easy Steps  (really helpful by the way if you want to learn Linux, here’s a link to buy it from amazon). How suprised was I when I booted the disc and the OS just booted straight from the disc, being a regular windows user I wasn’t used to this sort of ease of use, I’m used to having to install a driver for every bit of hardware I use. It just worked. recently I have downloaded Ubuntu Linux 8.04 and Installed it on a virtual machine. I am shocked.

whereas Windows and Mac OS try to keep the user from going ‘behind the scenes’ Linux invites you in, nearly anything can be done from the shell or on boot up. I am not accustomed to this kind of freedom. Though I do have one slightly major gripe with Linux. Windows uses a setup program for nearly all it’s software, Mac OS usually has to drag it to the Apps folder, easier than windows. But linux, if it’s easy you have to just open a program and install it. If it’s hard, it’s hard. I tried to install apache as I’m planning to use linux for a web server, I could not install apache no matter how hard I tried. That however, seems to be the only major flaw with an otherwise rock solid OS, however, this week I have a lot of spare time to burn so I will try and clock in a few hours on the VM using Ubuntu.

Thanks for Reading

Happy Surfing