Open Source Ahoy!

First off, I'm quite new to Linux, I've been tinkering around with it only for about a year and a half now. However, the experience has been riveting enough for me to realise that I'm probably never going to be even remotely comfortable with Windows again.

I had tried Linux almost three years back, to begin with, but that experience
was quite a bad one. I had tried to install Suse 9.3, which was a 4-CD pack that had come with my laptop (a Compaq Presario V2000). However, the resolution was way off, and I could only see a quarter of a window at a time. Being a total noob at the time, I panicked and installed Mandriva 6 the next day.

Mandriva 6 was quite nice, but I never managed to figure out how to install packages. There was a package manager, but I never figured out how to get it to work. This may have been due to the fact that, in my college, access to the net is through a proxy server. Well, that was that and I used Windows XP for the next two years.

Then I got bitten by the sality bug. The sality virus, for the uncompromised (lucky you!), is a virus that affects all exe files on the system. I reinstalled windows twice, but the virus returned despite me formatting the entire disk both times. It was only during my third re-installation that I figured out that my driver files (all exe files of course) which I had made a backup of much earlier were corrupted with the virus and that they were the source of the problem reappearing each time. The third time round, I downloaded all the drivers off the net.

However, I was sick and tired of windows after all the trouble that I had taken and I decided to give Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) a try. I didn't like the default look, but I soon realised that everything was customisable and after discovering Gnome-Look.org I fell totally head-over-heels in love with Ubuntu.

A few months after that I switched to Intrepid and shortly after that I moved on to Jaunty. However, I chose to install Kubuntu over Ubuntu. KDE 4.2 totally changed the preconceived notions that I had had about a desktop.

I had quite a few problems with Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) though. Gnome applications looked terrible, most notably, firefox looked terribly unseemly, with black boxes around radio buttons and what not. The problem was somewhat mitigated by an install of the qt, qtcurve, human and human-clearlooks themes, but Gnome apps still looked bad in the main. Another problem was that linuxdcpp(the linux app that's used in place of the windows app dc++), kept crashing all the time. Still, I was quite satisfied with the KDE-Jaunty combo.

Since I had quite a bit of free time on my hands, I decided to give Fedora 11 a spin. More on that in the next post!