I've been contemplating the idea of trying Linux out for years. Back in high school I even bought a book on Red Hat and tried to install it to my second HDD. It worked, sort of, I got it running but couldn't figure out how to configure anything. That led me to some significant frustration and I eventually put away linux, thinking that was that. Well recently I've been fooling around with some NetSec stuff and I came by this very cool linux distro which I found out I could run off of a USB drive. I read a bit more and found out that installing this distro (BackTrack) on a USB stick was actually pretty easy. So I did that and just out of my adventures into NetSec topics I was exposed to some Linux. I felt that it wasn't that difficult to figure things out in BT, and I didn't mind the terminal stuff since anything I didn't know I could just google. One thing led to another and a few months later I started to read more about this really cool distro called Ubuntu which apparently seemed to be very popular. I figured the popularity of the distro is probably a sign that it is actually accessible to linux noobies, and I was right. Last Friday I decided to partition my laptop so that I could try out ubuntu on it.
It has been almost a week later and I have to say I love it. Ubuntu is very stable, pretty lean, which makes my laptop much more usable now compared to my winXP boot. I absolutely love repo and how easy it is to navigate it. For those that don't know what repo is, it is basically like the iTunes app store. It is a compilation of servers where people that develop open source (FREE) software posts all their goodies, so you can just browse thousands of applications and install whatever you need, all for free. It's quite amazing and they have a wonderful selection of programs that really makes windows for me just half necessary. I think because I am into gaming I will still use windows for that. Linux has Wine which allows you to play win games, but I don't mind running a windows machine. Also, MS Office still a must for me, open office just doesn't cut it. Repo works off of the terminal as well, and installing software on linux is even easier than it is on Windows. I have to say, for anyone still intimidated to get into using this amazing free resource, don't be... There are quite a few Linux distros available that will make your transition super easy. I've been reading a lot and listening to some great podcasts about linux, so if anyone has questions about Linux and whether or not you should try it out, please msg me.
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