ubuntu
So I decided to try to walk the walk after talking so much about open source. I loaded up a laptop, an old amd 700 with about 300 MB of memory, with ubuntu the dapper drake version. Well technically i didn’t even load it up myself. i asked my brother who works at a computer repair store if he happened upon any free old laptops as he usually does, he replied yes, and after telling him i planned to load ubuntu on it he said he already had one with that, so i took it. I say this because I believe its important to the story and because I’m just that honest. So any way new computer and OS in hand I set out to learn a thing or two about this release which is praised not only for its ease of use but for the way Ubuntu is set up to always and forever remain free.
The first thing I noticed off the bat was the extremely user friendly GUI, usually pronounced gooey for those non code literate, thats Graphical user interface. Anyway the GUI resembles windows visually. A nice thing considering I’m not a fan of the mac icon tray that many really love. anyway I think its important to have something familiar for those who think linux = command line. I’m in no way claiming that linux isn’t command line because ooooh it sure is.
Getting to know the terminal was both a pain and quite fun. It’s a pain because as I learn, and the way i learn is through slow emulation of example and constant error, I slowly just want to move to my desktop and be content with windows. However its fun because you are actually having to think instead of being lazy and pushing around a cursor. And yes there are several things that are fully GUI compatible, many debian files are click operable. However a good amount of things require the use of the terminal.
To tie this together with moving opensource to the main stream I like to take a second to realize that linux may never fully be accepted by normal PC users but Ubuntu and the software used in the daper drake release give hope to the small flicker that one day a user friendly linux OS may surface. More on this later.