::People of the sun::

I started to hate Linux pretty much directly after I tried to get it working on my new personal computer, back in 1999. The idea of having a somehow ‘free’ operating system  seems to be extremely tempting. The only problem was Linux just not being ready and/or usable  on desktop computers at all. I spent my entire Christmas holidays playing around with Suse Linux 6.something to get the video card working but finally decided it’s just not worth trying to get it running any further. Since that day I was secretly obsessed  with the idea of one day running Linux on my main computer in the far, far future. After several attempts every once in a while and lots of setbacks Linux finally found its way on all of my servers. That still was not what I’m looking for since most of that machines were headless console only boxes so I kept trying. Over the last 10 years or so Linux changed a lot, some distributions came to life and other vanished. One annoying fact over that “I-kept-trying” period was that almost every distribution had fundamental differences like different location of config files or even different names of those. Debian always seemed to have a more stable and consistent approach than for instance Suse. On the other hand Suse has been more user friendly which Debian lacked. Around the year 2005 I  figured out that my need of fiddling around with config files in a desktop environment tended against zero. What I really wanted was a System that directly worked out of the box and let me pretty much just do most of the things I used to do in my Windows environment. I kept trying different distribution and even became a fan of CentOS on my headless boxes but still failed to replace my Windows since sometimes even simple thing were just not working properly while testing Linux.

Long story cut short: I recently gave it another try with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and was extremely surprised! It is actually usable.  It also replaced my beloved Windows 7 on my main workstation very quickly. A lot of things are of course really different and I like to share some thoughts and tricks with you since I still like the idea of a free and open operating system.

Stay tuned.

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Sound of the day: Art vs Science – Parlez-Vous Francais?