I Love, No, Hate, No, Love... Ubuntu
I spend most of my time on Linux, I use it at work, I run it on the laptop I'm using to write this, I have it on my wife's computer and my daughters' computer. It simply has huge advantages over Windows:
- It's FREE
- It is easy to administer both locally and remotely
- My kids and wife cant really break anything
- Things typically just work
- Did I mention it's free, and comes with a shit-ton of free software?
I do use windows now-and-then for gaming, though I find I'm using my Xbox 360 for games more than my PC these days...
So why the love/hate relationship? This laptop. I was foolish and bought a new, cutting-edge laptop in the hopes that it would last me a good number of years and be a good development box, since I don't have any very beefy machines at home.
It is the cutting-edge bit that kills me. Tonight, after owning the thing for 3-4 months, I finally have sound. To get it I'm having to run a pre-release version of Ubuntu where random things don't seem to work for me, but I have sound! I've spent 4-5 hours over the last few nights upgrading it and getting it to boot at all, then boot into a GUI, then boot into a GUI that looks at all correct, then reliably reboot, etc... Times like these make me think I should have gotten a Mac... But then I want to do things like run Erlang, and being able to just say apt-get Erlang is just SO EASY.
With time things will just start working on my laptop as people with more hardware skillz and time than me donate their time to help people like me out. Open Source software is a beautiful thing. Hopefully something I work on in the future can go towards paying them back for the work they've done for me.
