I don’t know about the world’s current opinion about Linux on the Desktop. Chances are that mentoning those two words on a popular website causes a flame war and whatnot. There’s even the possibility that some people react bored and irritated when they stumble over yet another of those news items:
- Linux Desktop Ready, Says Mainstream Media [slashdot]
- A Glimpse at the Linux Desktop of the Future [slashdot]
- Norwegien desktop Linux switch halted [silicon]
- Was l�¤uft auf dem Linux-Desktop? [german] [heise]
- Xandros macht sich stark f�¼r den standardisierten Linux-Desktop [german] [heise]
I recently took upon me the endeavour of installing Linux on my temporary workstation. The reason is simply that there was no Windows CD arround. So I went to a friend to grab a NetInstall CD of Debian, my favourite distribution. With about 112MB it only takes a few minutes to download. I had installed Linux quite a few times before and tested various distributions (RedHat, Gentoo, Suse) but Debian always appealed to me the most (there actually was a time when I loved Gentoo, but that’s another topic). As I had some experience in installing Linux I prepared myself for a rather long, painfull procedure, and did not expect to come any close to starting X, using the mouse and starting a web browser within the first session (which I limited to three hours). Well what can I tell you. I was done after 1.5 hours! Up and running a nice Debian with X server and Gnome. And I am not taking credit for this, but I’m giving credit to the Debian project and probably all Linux distributions, hardware autodetection developers, kernel developers and so forth. Appart from that I really love apt-get, and the Debian package management system. I needed an ftp-client, so I typed “apt-get install gftp” and voilat. 3 minutes later I could run “Applications -> Internet -> gFTP”. It “just worked”! The same with GIMP btw.
In case you never tried it, or in case you had the same feeling about it to be a long and painfull process, give it another try. It’s really worth it. Although I never used it myself, many use Ubuntu nowadays, which is sayed to provide an even better user experience. So check it out.