Adventures in linux

I am an Ubuntu fan. More specifically, Xubuntu, which uses XFCE instead of the more popular Gnome or KDE. I'm not a Gnome or a KDE hater, XFCE looks a lot like Gnome in my opinion. It just doesnt't have all the bells and whistles that Gnome or KDE has. I think I liked KDE so much, because since DOS 6.22 had gone away, I had become used to the look and feel of the Windows Environment and KDE was very much like Windows. KDE was great, it had many bells and whistles, and was just fun to use.

When I first started in Linux, I had become bored with Windows. It no longer held any attraction for me. So I was taught on Gentoo. A very powerful distro. Highly customizable, and if you knew what you were doing, optimized specifically for you hardware. This same thing can also be said for pretty much most of the distro's out there. I learned a lot diving head first into Gentoo, with the assistance of a very patient friend.

After several months, I was very efficient with the install process. My problem (which was myself) was I like to tweak and change things. This caused me many, many, many late nights reinstalling. But, I learned a lot about Linux in the process, and had a lot of fun doing it.

After about a year, I decided to start playing around with other distros. I liked the way a lot of them looked, SUSE was nice, but not for me, Mandriva, I wasn't crazy about. Slackware, scared the devil out of me. CentOS and Fedora where cool, but still not for me.

After downloading and burning and testing 30+ different live cd's, I ran across Ubuntu 5.04. It was awesome. This is the distro I used to completely rid my home of Windows. I could do everything I needed to and all of it was done in linux, and if I couldn't, well, I just got over it. It was usually something trivial anyway.

It became even more awesome when I learned about Kubuntu.
Being that I was a big fan of KDE, Kubuntu rocked. And that is what I used until I bought my first netbook. The ASUS EeePC 701. This little experiment shipped with a 4 Gig SSD as the internal drive. Kubuntu just wouldn't fit. After several google searches, I ran across XFCE. Lightweight, efficient and minimal. This led me to Xubuntu, which I believe is perfect for a netbook.
All the power of Linux, without the overhead of some of the more popular desktop environments. It was a good match for a netbook.

I still use Xubuntu to this day, why, it just works. I don't need all of the eye candy, and eye candy may look good, but I think it overpowers a lot of the netbooks. I like to be able to use my resources, not wait for the computer to catch up to me.

While I am pretty sure that my current netbook, the Samsung NC10, can handle the eye candy, I just don't want to give up the resources for it.

Do I hate Windows, not really, I still use it on my laptop issued to me from work. I don't complain about it (not very much anyway) , I just want everything to work when I turn on my computer. While no OS is perfect, you just may be missing out by not giving linux a spin. Most of the distro's are free, support can be found in many forums, and there are tons of people willing to lend a helping hand.
I think that Linux is considerably more user friendly now than it ever was. Go ahead, give it a try.

A good place to start is here:
http://distrowatch.com/
You can find the most popular versions with links to download.
Or if you need a distro to perform a specific task, whether it be audio editing, video editing, or security, there is a distro for that too.
So what are you waiting for, dive in and give it a go.

Enjoy.