I have a new love. It’s not really new, but I just thought I’d spout off a bit about how much I love this part of my life. Linux, I love you. I love you so much in fact that I want to write a sonnet to you. I just moved a bunch of stuff around my gigantic linux box here, added a user (because he’s going to use my box to run something for my new group and he needed access to the pages and tcl directories). I was able to add him as a user both of the system and the db, move the pages and tcl directories, change permissions on them to allow him to use them, and bounce the server all in about 3 minutes. If I were using… Solaris, that would have taken much longer. Why? Because Linux has nice GUI-based tools for doing this stuff. Solaris may be rock-solid and everything, but Linux is leagues ahead in ease-of-use and in most distributions, bundled software. Everytime I have to help someone set up Solaris, I have to spend several hours downloading things like gcc, make, gzip, emacs, etc. You’d think Sun would give you the option to choose what you want to install. “Is this a developer workstation? Ok, we’ll install the stuff you’ll use every day.” or “You’re going to set this up as a big huge server? Ok, we’ll only install the OS and you can configure the rest.”
Plus, Linux is just fun. It’s a great tinkering OS. You can get under the hood if you want and play around with services, compiling software, etc. Or, if you’re just into playing with the surface, you can skin just about everything.
It’s funny. The more I use Linux and Mac OS X, the less I like Windows. I started on Windows and still use it at home and as my main machine at work because I’m just more comfortable with it. That doesn’t mean I like it. I’m kind of tied to it. Why? I work at AOL and we have to use the AOL Client to get mail, and everyone sends docs in Word format. I know all the arguments for StarOffice, KOffice, etc, but I just can’t get into them. Plus, I like to play UT and Jedi Knight too much to give it up.
I like having all my options open. I love being able to switch from one OS to the other without much difficulty. It’s a great time to be a geek!!!! (and yes, I know this whole ramble was incoherently geeky – so sue me)