Been a while since blogging around here, been spending time getting a new operating system just the way I like it and pretty happy with it now. After trying out a few open source distros like Lindows, Lycoris, Knoppix, and Debian, and a couple others with even funnier names, I finally went with a free Red Hat Linux program called “Fedora Coreâ€, version 4 now.
It makes for a real nice computer, all the bells and whistles are there. Monitors, wireless mouse and keyboard, scanner, all ready to go “right out of the boxâ€. Now I can have four desktops going at once, much easier to navigate than a single screen, instead of a dozen overlapping windows we have two related ones on one desktop, music going on another one, writing this blog, email and the internet on this desktop, it’s multitasking at it’s finest.
Other than for web servers, which are completely different animals than home PC’s, Linux has just been on the edges for me, tempting with all it’s nifty shortcuts and software that isn’t available for any other platform than a *nix kernel. Not many people will dispute the Linux kernel for it’s stability for a machine running a dedicated set of instructions like a server, but I was surprised at it’s stability as a multitasking home PC as well. With a bit of effort, I was able to crash the windows GUI portion eventually, but to fix it all I had to do was switch to another user, the computer itself kept running fine.
Being a web developer, I need to test sites on Windows so of course there is still one of those around, the old reliable Compaq that I’ve had for years now has been cleaned out with a fresh Windows install and the latest Internet Exploder. Seems that the rendering system for the Firefox browser is really close to what is used in Mac machines as well, first thing I noticed was my home page for the web hosting is messed up using Fedora, time to get back to work!
Yo Mark,
Linux (and UNIX) rocks! I used to use RedHat on my home workstation, but I switched to FreeBSD about four years ago and never looked back. I’m more comfortable in BSD than Linux because of the ancestry (I started using a BSD UNIX system in 1982), but they’re really pretty similar (although you can’t beat the BSD ports facility).
It’s often thought that BSD is only good as a server, but it’s great as a workstation as well.
By the way, did you look at Mepis? It’s a terrific Lunix distro as well.
OP
Once I got on to Fedora I was happy, Mepis was on the list along with Gentoo but they started to look the same after a while. It was the wide range of people in the support community that finally convinced me, and the live web servers are running Red Hat, so was familiar with those interfaces too. It was easier to install and get the software I needed than Windows, who would thought that?
Probably any distro now a days would be fine for a workstation as long as it’s set up for the purpose. Every system had a GUI interface and came with email, word processing, a browser, and an office/web productivity suite of some sort. It really is amazing that all this work has been done on Linux in just such a short time.