Ubuntu

I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux for nine months now and have enjoyed it immensely. I’m a computer geek anyway, so linux is the perfect toy for me. I love the customizability and control linux gives me. I can open up a bash shell and do most of my work from there. In fact, for the last several months I’ve been using the Fluxbox window manager. It provides very few graphical utilities, so I do most of my work from the command line.

Aside from the terminal, my favorite thing about linux in general and Ubuntu specifically is all the open source software that is available for it. Everything running on the box right now is free/open source software. It is awesome to watch how the open source community has made such great products.

Simply because of the way linux and other unixes (like Mac OS X) are built, viruses and spyware are generally not a concern. Security is much easier to maintain. I don’t even have any antivirus software on this box and have never had a problem.

One perpetual issue with linux is hardware support. The built-in wireless card on my Compaq Presario laptop has never worked reliably, despite my earnest efforts. But by and large, the default installation of Ubuntu 6.06 (the first version I used) found most of my hardware and made it work sufficiently well. I’m using 7.04 now, and it all still runs great.

So as I was surfing today I found a few interesting items: