Undulations

Until recently, I was rather avert to all those Linux distributions lurking around - the only ones I even bothered to try out were a few editions of Ubuntu — part of the reason for this was the bloated and slightly-rough-around-the-corner nature of most Linux distributions. The other part was simply that there were just too many of them. And the third reason was, er, I was (am, in fact) slightly confused about the free-software ideals - more on that in a later post.

Today, however, I finally decided to take the plunge - a decision induced by a prolonged exposure to a Linux-geek friend of mine, whose ways of literally gliding across hordes of terminal windows and workspaces made me drool. Now that I’ve finally taken the dip and installed Ubuntu Natty Narwhal on my laptop, I’m getting demystified on many things. Simply put, it’s the PC counterpart of the Android v/s iOS tale, with Linux similar to the former and a typical Windows-based setup similar to an iOS device. The former gives you a lot of space to experiment and tinker with, while the latter gives you a much more stable interface where everything just works - it’s fine and good, but you’ll soon get bored, there is little left for you to tinker with and customize.

Secondly, just like Android, you don’t know half of the tale if you don’t have an internet connection. Even enabling your PC to play your MP3 collections will require you to download and install a bunch of codecs over the internet - this is weird, but the vast, nearly an app-store-like expanse of software repositories, and the paradigm for app installations will soon sweep you away. Soon, you’ll find yourself merrily adding repositories and installing stuff, making your rig do whatever you want it to do.

And finally, you may not find something you want where you wanted it to be. But given enough patience and interest, you can customize; evolving a desktop of your own. There is a lot of ways to tinker around, lot of things to discover.

The end verdict shouldn’t be surprising, especially once I say I’m an ardent Android fan. It was six hours ago that I’ve installed Natty Narwhal on my PC first. And within this six hours, I’ve gotten a hang of Unity, configured and played with Empathy and Gwibber, installed BURG, crashed my OS entirely and reinstalled it over again, and is now replacing the default Unity desktop with Gnome 3. And did I forget to mention, it’s 4:18AM here, and I haven’t slept yet.

Yet, Linux - I’m in love - if not with the complex and almost Utopian ideals of Free software, simply with the sheer amount of geekish pleasure you give!