So I finally did what I have been planning for long. A full transition to Linux at home. There were many reasons for this. I've long been a Windows user and quite happy being so. The Windows journey of course started early with 3.1 (around '94-'95), then 95, 98, skipped ME, 2000 and all that, on to XP and finally Vista. Good times, no major complaints. Vista actually wasn't even that bad for an operating system. Stable, loads of software and easy to use.

But Windows is, well, boring. I find that especially now working in IT and through my job working a lot with Linux too, that I need more challenges and 'excitement' from my operating system at home. Just to keep the mind challenged a bit more than with the idiot proof Windows system. I had been using Linpus Linux on my Acer Aspire One notebook for some time, and that only grew my desire to change my main desktop computer to Linux. One other big reason I wanted to switch to Linux was that it is open source. I'm a huge fan of open source and community driven development.

Linux distros have come a long way to being a real alternative to Windows and Mac in recent years. They're more easier to use, work pretty well and are easier and easier for even the normal user to install and use. Of course, there is the question of what distro one would go for, a question you really don't have to consider with Windows and Mac. I did my research and quickly narrowed it down to either Ubuntu or Fedora based. Both have their advantages. Ubuntu is being marketed for it's easy of use, large software base and generally as a stable system. Fedora on the other hand came out to me with a more power user experience - not really designed for any particular type of user. I wan't a system that works, has all the things I need to start out, but that I can customize to anything I feel like doing.

So I chose Fedora. To balance things out and keep myself accustomed to the Ubuntu platform as well I decided to upgrade my Acer notebook to Kuki Linux, which is an Ubuntu based distro especially designed for the Acer Aspire One.

For a desktop environment I chose GNOME on my Fedora. Kuki comes with Xfce by default.

The Fedora installer managed to crash four times which of course wasn't a very good start. I kept going though and got the system up and running. Fedora didn't support my WLAN chip very well (due to a bug) but Google kindly gave me the answer after some digging. Got the net working properly, installed loads of stuff and system updates that nicely update automatically without any problems. The first thing I noticed about Fedora was that it really does have just about everything one needs for a basic operating system. All decent utilities, like gEdit for writing code 'n' stuff, Firefox for browsing the web, a decent CD/DVD writer, an excellent file manager, MP3 players, Pidgin for IM, etc etc. I even decided to stick with gEdit for now, but since have installed some other programs like FileZilla, Songbird, Chromium, PuTTY, Dropbox, GnomeBaker, Wine and DigiKam to name a few. All install without any problems due to Linux's excellent package management system.

Fedora boots fast, after the boot loader is passed it takes maybe 10 seconds to reach the login prompt. After logging in there's no waiting to open programs like in Windows. The system works pretty well straight from the boot. Generally the whole system feels very stable and so far I haven't had to boot the system once to recover from some sort of system failure that is typical to Windows. You know, when some service or program crashes and the only way to get it running again is the boot the whole operating system..

As for the Kuki Linux running on my AA1. Anyone who is still using Linpus I whole heartedly recommend changing to Kuki. As it is has been designed with the AA1 in sight, it works straight out of the box. Everything! Quick install, maybe 15 minutes, one boot and the system was running with all the hardware devices functioning perfectly. Good stuff Kuki team!

All in all having great fun with my Linux experience and certainly will be writing a lot more about Linux here in the future. I still use Windows XP heavily at work, but that's not a bad thing since I like to keep myself up to date with different operating systems.

[ linux // acer aspire one // fedora // ubuntu // kuki // windows // operating systems ]