🚀 go-pugleaf

Cross posted to aus.flame as that is where my mates live ;-)
I haven't been in here for a few years, little busy, and lost some
enthusiasm
for Home Linux for a while.  Those of you old enough to remember the
name,
will remember me as a Linux evangelist, from the first slackware
through to the Fedora 7ish.

Then something happened.  We got a lot more distributions.  Linux
distros
became MUCH larger.  What would work on one Linux would core
dump on another.  What worked on version X of a distro, no longer
worked on version X+1 (KDE is a GREAT example of this, I used to
LOVE that interface to X, now I can't hear it without going SPIT!).

All in all, Linux became hard to use.  I thought that sad.  Then a
couple
of years ago I got a pack in the mail from SuSe/IBM/Novel that
contained
a STACK of DVDs that purported to be Linux.  It looked like all
of the bad bits from zOS, Solaris, AIX, SMIT and Netware rolled
up into a nasty package that seemed not to do anything at all
except use disk space.

At that point I pulled the pin.  Still kept on supporting and
installing
Red Hat, Centos, Solaris at work, but a home, a copy of Windows
XP was purchased for my laptop.  Lo, it worked.  The speakers spake,
the movies played, my web cam worked.  Without several hundred
hours of shell scripting.  gVim and the WAMP2 stack made development a
doddle.  So I stuck with XP for a few years.

Last year it was time for a re-org on my now three lappies, so I
thought
"maybe Linux has settled" and gave a few distros a go.  BLEH!
Back to XP at home.

Recently, the hard drive gave up on my old favourite workhorse,
an Acer Aspire 9500 with a great 17" display.  So, armed with
$160, picked up a new 160GB drive.

Microsoft would not come to the party and let me download an OS
even though I quoted my purchase code, date of purchase,
place of purchase etc.  Fuck.  They want several hundred
dollars for an abortion called Vista, or a better, but bigger one,
Windows 7.

So I tried the Linux/UNIX offerings again.  Red Hat - Fedora - Centos
were just hopeless.  Fedora wouldn't even boot.  Free BSD reminded
me of being in the 70s again.  Open Solaris wouldn't boot.
Vanilla Debian fired up, but was UGLY, and bloody hard to configure.
Nearly gave up, and gave UBUNTU 10.10 a try.

It worked!  And not only that, worked well.  I plugged in the Logitech
USB speakers and they played Led Zep at me!  Double click
on my guitar lessons, and up popped my tutor on video teaching
me how to play Blackbird, THROUGH the speakers as well!
Thunderbird ACTUALLY managed to pick up my mail!
My web cam flashed it's spotlight at me and started streaming
my ugly mug!  The thing connected to my wireless router
without even telling me!

So I am back in camp.

Seriously, if anyone wants to see how a distro SHOULD be put
together, this is the creme' de la creme' of distros for the
desktop/Laptop.  All the standard stuff works out of the box.
apt-get made it easy to build a server/development environment
under the pretty stuff.

I was so impressed, I am now Windows free apart from a test
machine (gotta have ONE).

A very good experience.

Mark Addinall.