MenZa’s Weblog

Oh, this issue has been raised hundreds of times, and up until now pretty much everyone has decided it hasn’t been yet, and I must say I’ve agreed up until now. But Linux is constantly evolving, and development is currently faster than it’s ever been. In my oh-so-humble opinion, it’s only a matter of time until Linux is a viable alternative to Windows, which your current Windows user will be able to switch to in a matter of days. Alas, it isn’t so (yet), but we’re definitely getting close.

When I first tried Linux ~2 years ago, I decided to go for the easiest distro at the time (Ubuntu—it remains the easiest), and even that had a lot of accessibility issues; it was difficult to install kernel modules (if you’re a new user, like I was), a lot of things felt clumsy, wireless support was pretty much non-existant and so on and so forth.

Now, since then, I’ve swapped back and forth a lot between Windows and Ubuntu, and I recently made the final switch to Ubuntu, and I haven’t regretted it once. I can also feel that a lot of things have been worked on heavily for the past two years; proprietary drivers are available directly from the Ubuntu repositories (you’re even asked if you want to install them if you try to enable Compiz—which Ubuntu 7.04 [Feisty] ships with), there’s tons and tons of documentation for it, there’s the endless number of IRC channels and community forums available—and even commercial support if you want to ensure that important corporate database server stays running. So WHY isn’t Linux more wide-spread?

After browsing digg, I read this—something that really warmed my heart for some reason. Our baby is growing up. It’s ready for its venture into the great world; beyond the realms of geekery.

I see big things coming.