Linux Desktop
I don’t know about the world’s current opinion about Linux on the Desktop. Chances are that mentoning those two words on a popular website causes a flame war and whatnot. There’s even the possibility that some people react bored and irritated when they stumble over yet another of those news items:
- Linux Desktop Ready, Says Mainstream Media [slashdot]
- A Glimpse at the Linux Desktop of the Future [slashdot]
- Norwegien desktop Linux switch halted [silicon]
- Was l�¤uft auf dem Linux-Desktop? [german] [heise]
- Xandros macht sich stark f�¼r den standardisierten Linux-Desktop [german] [heise]
I recently took upon me the endeavour of installing Linux on my temporary workstation. The reason is simply that there was no Windows CD arround. So I went to a friend to grab a NetInstall CD of Debian, my favourite distribution. With about 112MB it only takes a few minutes to download. I had installed Linux quite a few times before and tested various distributions (RedHat, Gentoo, Suse) but Debian always appealed to me the most (there actually was a time when I loved Gentoo, but that’s another topic). As I had some experience in installing Linux I prepared myself for a rather long, painfull procedure, and did not expect to come any close to starting X, using the mouse and starting a web browser within the first session (which I limited to three hours). Well what can I tell you. I was done after 1.5 hours! Up and running a nice Debian with X server and Gnome. And I am not taking credit for this, but I’m giving credit to the Debian project and probably all Linux distributions, hardware autodetection developers, kernel developers and so forth. Appart from that I really love apt-get, and the Debian package management system. I needed an ftp-client, so I typed “apt-get install gftp” and voilat. 3 minutes later I could run “Applications -> Internet -> gFTP”. It “just worked”! The same with GIMP btw.
In case you never tried it, or in case you had the same feeling about it to be a long and painfull process, give it another try. It’s really worth it. Although I never used it myself, many use Ubuntu nowadays, which is sayed to provide an even better user experience. So check it out.
No Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.