Linux is becoming popular?
Now that post title could imply several things, I’m either a nix sceptic or fan, well neither at the moment actually, I havnt’ been convinced either way.
I’ve just picked up on a BBC post entitled Battle of the Operating Systems. The BBC were looking (its closed now) for a Vista, Mac OS and Linux fan to go head to head to debate the comparative benefits of their favourite operating system. What was interesting was seeing the number of people singing the praises of linux distributions, mainly Debian and the Ubuntu distribution built upon it. Certainly its nice to see although probably more a reflection of the BBC News Technology readership than anything else.
Personally I find it difficult to choose a side on this one, I’ve used all three although I usually fall back to windows XP for most tasks, purely to be honest beacuse its the one I’m most familiar with (not to mention I don’t own a Mac), my school had a large network of Mac OS 9 machines which like windows I had a love/hate relationship with so I’ve had a pretty good period of use of Mac (granted OSX has changed a lot). And then there’s Linux, I’ve been running Ubuntu linux on my IBM X31 for the last couple of months and to be honest I was pleasently surprised.
The install was really easy and all drivers were there straight away, the fantastic array of free software available is incredibly useful and easy to install, not to mention the operating system runs at quite some speed. The similarities between it and Mac OS are most striking, Apple’s keychain is Ubuntu’s keyring etc. The only issue I’ve had is rather slow connection times with the Cisco wireless card installed in the laptop which in itself is causing quite a lot of frustration.
I’m hoping the BBC will make this ‘Battle of the Operating Systems’ available online, it’ll be interesting to see what people are saying at any rate!
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