Linux - The Choice of a GNU Generation
Here is, or will soon be my Linux page. I've been using Linux as my operating system of choice for several years now, so I decided to put up a page dedicated to it and my experiences with it. Most of what I post here will be anecdotal, since my other obligations in life prevent me from forming any sort of Linux technical site - I'll leave that up to the 'big boys' for now. :)
Presently, I run Gentoo Linux on all of my home computers. I chose Gentoo after a number of years running SuSE Linux because of its flexibility and the fact that you start from essentially nothing and have to build the system from the ground up. Gentoo is still a young distribution by all respects, but for such a new-comer it's come a long way in a short time. The developers don't reccomend running Gentoo on a server system, and I'll grant you that it's not ready for a large-scale server implementation, but I trust it enough to run my server and that's good enough for me.
I am registered Linux user #130157 at the Linux Counter.
A reccomendation, if you will. My latop presently triple-boots between Linux and two Microsoft OS's; mainly for the purposes of playing movies (video files of all types), games, and word processing. Why is this, you ask? Because these are areas in which Linux simply does not excell, or, in which it DID not excell. I'm happy to say that with the advent of a new Open Source media player, MPlayer, I am able to play all sorts of movie files under Linux smoothly and nearly flawlessly. MPEG, DivX, ASF, AVI, you name it, it plays them. I beg of you; if you run Linux, give this product a try! Now as for the other areas, I'm getting quite excited about the prospects, especially in the word processing arena. Us Linux users now have the choice between several fine (and free - as in beer) word processor packages. The first one that comes to mind does so because of its simple elegance. It's small, sleek, quick, and to the point. That being Abiword. The other word processor near the top of my list is Open Office. Build 641C (current at time of writing) is showing signs of definite improvement over the old StarOffice 5.1 days. No longer does it take over my entire desktop, but it now boasts shortened load times and more responsiveness (never underestimate the importance of those two feats on a Celeron!).
