A Positive Linux Experience

I have a confession to make.

Although I have been advocating the use of open source, both in this blog and in "real life", I have not been using Linux. I love the principle behind open source and Linux but the past experiences I had with different disto of Linux had made me stick it out with Windows at the office and OS X at home (and everywhere else). Well, that was the case until yesterday.

I am in the middle of an office-sponsored training and in one of the modules of that training, we need to use Linux. We were given a Live CD of a particular Linux distro (which I'm not at a liberty to say at the moment due to an NDA) and I booted it off my training PC. Once I had it running off the training center's network, I was mildly surprised at the development in current Linux distros -- it was easier to use now. I was able to do a lot of things with this Linux LiveCD and I didn't even had much problems using its terminal apps (thanks to my constant dabbling in my Mac's OS X Terminal.app).

The positive experience I had yesterday had actually inspired me to consider buying (I hope my wallet can withstand this one) a cheap pre-owned (read: second hand) laptop and install a user-friendly Linux distro in it. The distro I used yesterday is a derivative of SLAX, a lightweight Live CD distro of Linux. Now I intend to download this and use it daily at the office since SLAX is much more useable in the "real world" since it has all the applications I will need to use daily.

And one more thing: the good experience I had yesterday had also inspired me to continue advocating the use of Linux and open source.

technorati tags: Linux, geek, windows