Linux

I suppose at this point I should insert some sort of hook into Catholicism.  Perhaps I ought to have one of those posts debating which OS is more Catholic.  I’m certainly willing to entertain such debate in the comboxes.  This won’t be a geek article though.  I haven’t had a lot of interest in Linux.  For professional reasons, I thought I would give it a spin at home.  Linux is becoming more of a reality at the small business level, and commercial software available for Linux has come to the point where one can’t ignore the price point or more importantly the better scaling.  Buying software that can scale to 10,000 users often introduces needless complexity for sub-200 user organizations.  (See Exchange 2007.)

So anyhow I have been using the KDE desktop on SUSE Linux at home for about three months now.  I also have Vista SP1 at home.  I was open to liking Vista.  I still don’t mind it.  The security is significantly improved.  That is a blessing and a curse.  I have a quad core processor, so I don’t have performance issues.  At this point I wouldn’t be grossly afraid to implement Vista SP1 at the corporate level – in other words I wouldn’t demand a downgrade to XP – but I’m not in a hurry to bring current systems I did downgrade up to Vista.  In regards to Linux specifically, the experience has been good.  I had anticipated that I would be the only one to use it, but my wife and 8-year-old find their ways around fine.  They mainly use it for the Internet though, so that shouldn’t be surprising.  My son has enjoyed saving the Pingus too.  I have been surprised at the number of free games available as well.  I’m just starting to explore some of those.  For a home system, I don’t think I could justify the $200 for Microsoft again.

I’m curious if any of our readers here use Linux.  If you have, what are your impressions?