I installed Mandrake Linux 10 on my little laptop at home last night - and it has to be said, I’m pretty pleased with it.
Everything worked right out of the box, apart from the WiFi card, which needed a bit of fiddling around with to get working.
I’ll admit to being less skilled than I would like with Linux, and of course I don’t really know what packages you get with things like KDE and Gnome, so it’s a bit of a voyage of exploration at the moment. KDE (one of the graphical desktops available) is very nice, but a little slow… kind of reminds me of a certain OS that hails from Redmond.
Once I’ve figured out how to set everything up, I may well find myself wiping the entire laptop and going “Linux Native” with it - at the moment I have the machine split down the middle; at boot time I choose either Win98 or Linux.
Some people might ask what the big deal is with Linux. I’ll try to explain; although if you are not a software developer you may have trouble getting your head around the argument.
Linux is built out of lots of small programs, whereas Windows is built out of a few large programs. A good analogy is a coffee-machine versus a stove, kettle, coffee, and cafetierre. Windows is the coffee machine. Linux is the stove, kettle, coffee and cafetierre. If a part of the coffee machine is broken, the whole thing stops working, and you might have to replace the whole thing - and you get no coffee… If stove, kettle, or cafetierre have a problem, the other bits work fine - and you can fix the problem without affecting anything else.
So there you have it. Linux is based on a very old, tried and tested philosophy that computer software should be designed to be specific; to do finite tasks well, and to accept input from humans or other software, and give output suitable for humans or other software…
I’ll stop there before this gets too deep