I love Linux. The year was 2005, I was 14. I had dialup, and I wanted to try out this Linux thing. I bought a 20 disc set of cds for Debian, and installed it on

I love Linux. The year was 2005, I was 14. I had dialup, and I wanted to try out this Linux thing. I bought a 20 disc set of cds for Debian, and installed it on my computer. I had to install it several times before I figured out to press the space bar to select to install a graphical environment. I also got a free disc in the mail for another thing called Ubuntu. Installed that too. Rather ugly brown. I spent hours trying to get it to talk to my modem to connect to the internet. I never could get the gui to work, I had to run it through the cli. I once decided to compile my own kernel because I could. There was a thrill in seeing it boot. I also finally figured out how to get opengl working with my radeon. Messing with esoteric xorg settings. Eventually I completely stopped booting into Windows XP. (Actually I spilled soy sauce on my video card. It would never work in Windows again, only Linux.) I tried a number of distros over the years. Gentoo is excellent, if you're an asocial computer nerd that enjoys compiling programs. I also did Linux From Scratch. Huge amount of fun. Learned a lot. I still remember the thrill of seeing Gnome finally start up. I set up a tiling window manager (can't even remember what it was). Most sparse desktop ever. Always had xine running on the left most desktop (started from the command line of course.) The development environment was excellent, (except for the lack of IDE). Huge number of libraries. Easily write a c program that could access the internet, parse video files, etc. And all of these libraries were easily installed. Valgrind was excellent, too. The last distro I extensively used was Fedora. Finally, though, I had enough. I grew tired of constantly having to fiddle with little shit. The final straw was I was just doing a generic update, and wifi stopped working. I couldn't figure it out, so I just wiped the drive and installed windows 7. It's nice to have things work, mostly. I miss the environment. Cygwin/mingw don't quite make it up, and powershell is a heaping sack of shit. I tried Linux Mint about a year ago. It was atrocious. I don't remember all of the details, but it was the little details that didn't work. The multimedia keys didn't work, this was a known bug that had been around for a while. The start menu was annoying to use, Windows 7 was actually better in this regard. I don't need to say anything about Gnome 3. I just bought a Macbook on Friday. I'm actually pretty excited, this will be my first modern Mac. I'm hoping that I'll get the awesome development environment of Linux/Unix and the polished interface of a commercial operating system. I once very strongly believed in support the FSF, but I want a computer that works. I don't have the time anymore to tinker with esoteric xorg settings.