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Those of you whom I consistently spam with too much information about my mundane life will know that last year, after using Mac OS X as my primary operating system, I went back to Linux. And boy, had things changed. When I was last using Linux, the big deal was Slackware. Yes, that should really tell you something about how long it's been - five years. And boy, have things changed since then. These days, I'm using Ubuntu on my laptop as my primary OS, and I maintain a Windows partition for certain things that are too much of a pain to run in Wine. (SPSS and World of Warcraft, I'm looking at you.)
I'm one of the few people who's consistently used Linux as a desktop and laptop OS for student and professional purposes since adoption. I've never believed that it wasn't "enterprise ready" (whatever the hell that may mean), and I'm sufficiently adaptable that having to learn a few different key commands to use Open Office never bugged me. I mean, it was a pain in the ass to get Slack to recognise my Epson all-in-one machine, but after I spent the requisite fourteen hours doing so, it worked at least as smoothly on my Linux box as it did on my iBook, and both had better performance than my housemate's XP machine.
I say all this because I was prepared to get back into the trenches, so to speak, and spend hours of my life trying to figure out what went wrong in a make file, going on IRC to get help with getting Ubuntu to recognise my Treo, etc. - it was a cost of ownership that I was willing to pay. And I have yet to have to pay it. Ubuntu just works. It's that simple. It just works. The only hassles that I've had to date are:
- Flash updates are infrequent, and they also mess with PulseAudio,
- Firefox can be a bit of a pain, in that it sometimes forgets that I've got Flash and Java,
- WoW doesn't like WINE.
That's it. Ubuntu has become so well developed that even someone such as I, a tech hobbyist and enthusiast, can use Linux without any problems. And if a problem obtains, then I'm one website away from finding comprehensive and intelligible instructions on how to solve them. No more late night sessions on #linuxhelp being told "stfu n00b read teh man page" or the like.
So, really, if you've got some old hardware that you don't think that you'll ever use again, throw Ubuntu on there. See what happens.
-dx
