It's Free They Say, If You Can Get It To Run

They say college is a time for experimentation, so here goes: After all my years of Windows, I'm finally test driving Linux.

Right now I'm posting from an Ubuntu live CD, but everything here looks a little too Mac-ish for my tastes, so I'm downloading the ISO for Kubuntu, a KDE version that's a little closer to what I'm used to. I also played around a little with Knoppix. The real challenge is seeing if there's any versions out there that will work with my wireless card...they seem to be notoriously disagreeable with Linux, from what I've seen so far.

Why the change? Two words: Windows Vista. To be perfectly honest, there are some really cool things in there. And once you turn off User Account Control it's almost bearable. And maybe, on a high-end computer with boatloads of RAM, it might even be as fast as I would like it to be. But the fact is, I've never been about the newest and the biggest and the best. What excites me is getting the littlest, cheapest one you can find, and then managing to get it to work every bit as well as the fancy new ones...or better. And with my last two laptops, I had a moderate amount of success in that department. But this one isn't working out quite so well. Vista hasn't driven me back to XP, but it's definitely encouraged me to start exploring my other options. And if I can master dual-bootery, I don't have to worry about those pesky Windows-exclusive programs that I still need for stuff. Although all of this exploration makes me wish I'd gone with a bigger hard drive.

Here's how it looks so far: Knoppix is winning in the looks department, but Ubuntu is way ahead with its ability to actually get me on the internet. Meanwhile, you all now think I'm an even bigger geek than before.