After the rage around my last post I decided to give the Linux thing a go. While I found that it didn't have all the shiny 'it just works' of Apple I'm totally hooked. I'm not sure if its totally customizable environment or the massive amounts of free stuff that do everything I need but there just seems to be something totally cool about being able to do whatever you want however you want. This is something that is pretty new to me after living in the polished dictatorship that is Apple.
What I tried
First I thought I'd try a bunch of different flavours to see what the difference was. On my trusty old Macbook I installed:
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
OpenSuse
Mint
Fedora 12
None of this was very taxing, more a splash around than a deep dive. Along the way I managed to find solutions to some of the problems I'd experienced with Linux before (see previous post 'Enter the Koala'). The multiple monitor issue was solved by turning the visual effects off completely in Gnome. Things were definitely workable and all the things that I needed were available to me. I was particularly impressed with Banshee. I know its available on OS X but iTunes had always seemed to do the job so I'd never looked at other alternatives. The end result of the Macbook experiment was that there didn't seem to be anything that I could do on my Mac that I couldn't do on Linux. My Mac hardware is getting a little old now with my Macbook being my only Intel based machine so it was time to look at a new tower.
Anyway so I've gone out and got myself a new desktop. Nothing too fancy but compared to my PowerPc based Macs and my Macbook much more band for my buck -- Quad 2.5 4GB RAM 512MB graphics card (for under half the cost of the cheapest Apple laptop). After the very quick testdrive of Linux flavours I've decided to go with Ubuntu (Gnome not KDE so far). Its taken a couple of days but I've got everything I think I'll need to tinker:
Groovy / Grails
Sun Java including JavaFX (also got the Open JDK)
Netbeans
Git
STS (Springsource's Eclipse which also includes Spring Roo which I'll blog about in the future)
Operating systems are like gyms
When I was younger I started going to the gym. At first I went to the hippest gym which had shiny weights and mirrors everywhere. Music pumped through the place while overtanned overmuscled instructors/sales people tried to convince to join up for another 12 months. Then after a time I got feed up with the high cost and overcrowding and went down to my local YMCA. The gym here was dusty and smelly. Equipment was old and worn.
But the Y had a vibe about it. It was about the sport.. about getting things done. There were no posers here it was all about the hard work. You left the place exhausted, people encouraged each other to lift more, push harder and you encouraged them to do the same. I worked much harder here, it was just the expectation that you spilled as much sweat as you could and became stronger for it.
Linux is that old gym. Sure it has more of a curve but once you begin to learn you become proud of the new skills you develop. The thousands of forums and blogs are testament to the community spirit that's out there. I know its only an operating system but after the locked in Apple approach it sure feels like I'm sticking it to the man now. I see why my previous post elicited such passionate responses. Now its my turn to live the Linux dream.
