Dirty Little Secret
OK, I’m gonna share a dirty little secret. Being a linux and formerly unix sysadmin for about a decade now, it’s a little embarrassing… For the last 18 years my primary desktop has always run Windows. Yes, there it is, I said it!
But a few weeks ago, I threw a new system drive in my computer, swapped my data drive, and installed Pinguy OS and I’m not looking back. I’ve been using Pinguy 10.10 on my work laptop since February and it’s proven rock solid. But 11.04 on a fast desktop is incredible.
I installed about 50 extra apps I can’t live without, transferred 500 GB of data from my old drive to a data drive, and have been playing with it non stop. It’s not lightweight, but it’s still snappy. CPU’s are fast and memory is cheap, so I see no need to run a light desktop shell. I’m generally not a big Ubuntu fan, preferring rpm based distro’s, but I can really say this is the nicest linux distro I’ve ever run. The other upside is I actually spend more time on my work laptop than my personal computer, so it’s nice to have everything the same. I already have to work in six different *nix’s at work, so simplifying the GUI OS’s I deal with is a welcome change.
Lots of eye candy if you want, intuitive apps, tight integration, and stable. Keep in mind my favorite window manager has always been enlightenment, so I expect a lot from my desktop environment. I have a dual boot set up, small windows partition, as there is one app I need that doesn’t run in wine and there’s no linux equivalent. So once a week I’ll boot into Win 7 and enter my new comics into the database, it’s a time consuming process anyway, so an extra 5 minutes rebooting a couple times isn’t that bad.
And a note on hard drives. I have been using Hitachi drives for about 7 years now in a few computers and they are great drives. All I buy now. Fast and reliable, don’t run too hot, and they last. A little noisy but that doesn’t bother me. OK kids, there you have it, my fave distro of 2011, give it a try, I highly recommend it!
