Linux is for real. I'm not a hacker or anything, I don't do programming in my spare time, it's just that I used to be an Apple II+ phreak in my teen days, so the world of computers isn't completely mysterious to me. I've just finished putting Red Hat's Manhattan kernel (I know, I know, this is the most corporate, marshmallow version, but I don't have the time to wallow in code) on my machine, I tucked Windoze away on a couple of partitions and put Linux on the rest, and am playing around with the thing just to see what it can do. My initial and totally newbie impressions:
Feel: The thing is one lean, mean mother of a piece of software. Like a BMW prototype engine, it just sits there and vibrates raw power. I have no clue as to what the thing could actually do in the right hands, but this particular kludgemeister was suitably impressed.
Reliability: Windows self-destructs on my machine with amazing regularity: every few hours, something goes haywire. It's not some app or something, I'll be typing away in MS Word, and horrible things happen. I've trolloped up and down Linux for awhile, and I've only gotten it to hang up once, and never to crash (though I'm sure there are ways...). The basic code seems to be rocksolid; some of the freeware apps, on the other hand, are a bit tetchy. But the OS itself just refuses to die.
Modularity: the thing is built into separable modules which can be updated, backdated, postdated, etc. I can see why it would make a wonderful developer's tool: it keeps track of updates, you can confirm upgrades etc. The documentation system is pretty impressive, with a thorough hypertext map of the basics, and the Linux programming tools are quite creative and pack quite a wallop.
Multitasking: works as advertised. It also seems to have a nifty sorting and filing system. The whole filing system is designed to mesh well with Internetting and multitasking, much more rationally laid out than Windoze.
Ease of Use: It's definitely still a hacker's delight, not (yet) the sort of plug-and-play deal as Windoze advertises itself as being, but the Red Hat version has a windows-style interface which pretty much does everything Win 95/98 can do. Only thing is there are a lack of consumer applications -- word processors, games, stuff like that, though I hear Corel is porting its stuff to the Linux platform, so the apps gap won't be an issue soon. As a confirmed Quaker (a beatific religion involving the worship of super shotguns... you don't want to know) I was glad to find out there is indeed a Linux version of Quake 2 out there, trouble is patches for video cards are hard to come by.
Still... I'm impressed. Linux was built by an essentially socialist cooperative of thousands of people, donated time, and a community spirit of free invention and cooperative exchange which is the dire antithesis of everything Microsoft's noxious greed exemplifies. And it's flat out *better* than anything the Evil Empire has scraped together.
Can other Linux users out there confirm/deny/qualify these totally off the cuff impressions?
-- Dennis