I am an OS Enthusiast

I am an OS enthusiast.

I play with computers, add and change hardware, but more often than that, I play with the operating systems themselves, modifying them until I have them just the way I like them.

I recently moved my very nice Aluminum iMac running the very nice Mac OS X 10.5 into my son's room, and bought myself a Shuttle Glamor, a new monitor and some peripherals. Instead of running Windows on my PC I wanted to move to a distribution of linux because we use linux at work for our development and production application servers.

I know, I have blogged about this stuff before. But I cannot help myself.

I tried several likely distributions (including PC-BSD, which is NOT linux, but more closely related to Mac OS X). I ended up choosing Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is probably the most user-friendly version of linux out there. The installation process is seamless, it supports most hardware, is fairly well optimized and it really "just works." There are a couple of shortcomings but they are solved very easily (and are well documented). One of the shortfalls is the fact that Canonical will not install proprietary drivers by default. So, if you have a fancy ATI or NVIDIA graphics card, a generic, open source (but working) driver will be installed. The proprietary, binary drivers ARE available by simply checking a checkbox in the Synaptic (the operating system's software update program) settings that tells it to allow the installation of proprietary code. Once that is done, you can run the Hardware Drivers program in the Administration application menu and it will ask you if you want it to install the proprietary drivers... you say yes, done.

I have made many tweaks since I first built this system, and it is very personalized. I have changed the UI to a theme called "WoodenLooks", rebuilt my kernel to support more memory, built a more recent version of the NVIDIA drivers, tweaked the networking so I could tunnel into work and installed loads of freeware that I use for both work and play.

I would say the only thing missing from linux are modern games. The usual suite of card and board games are present, but the major game manufacturers who produce games for Windows and Mac OS X do not bother with linux. There was once a company (Loki) who ported the great games to linux, but they went under (chapter 7) years ago. I believe that is because most of the people who use linux use it because it is FREE. Possibly because they cannot afford Windows or Mac OS X software. This would carry over to games, which are not cheap. So the market simply was not there. Recently there HAS been talk that maybe in the near future game companies would begin developing for linux, as the popularity of Ubuntu (a Debian-based distribution of linux) has sky rocketed in recent years.

Anyway, if you are experimental or have older hardware that Windows Vista or Mac OS X 10.5 will not run on, consider linux. It has come a LONG way and is seriously on par with the major proprietary operating systems. It is fast, attractive, very reliable, and with free software suites like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Evolution and others, it provides all the functionality most people would ever need.