The Linux news scene is currently littered with glimmering objects, and for a magpie such as myself (to continue that allegory) this represents far too much, far too bewildering, stimuli.
I took a look at Fedora 15 recently, and my experience with GNOME 3 was embittered by the whole furore surrounding Ubuntu and GNOME’s somewhat inamicable divorce. The dissonance in GNU/Linux as a is unsettling. So are the boastful major version increments evident in both GNOME and KDE.
Also, I’m sat there using it, and while the user experience was really quite good, the whole time I’m thinking “Is this bloatware? Is it really lighter than Windows 7?”
As the required system specs for Linux approach those of their proprietary rivals, they have to do more and more with the interface to make it worth using; that’s how it seems. The idea that Linux should not be considered a second-rate free alternative has led to Linux being as fat as everything else to accommodate an easy-to-use experience.
Contrastingly, Tiny Core Linux 3.6 is really great. I’ve tried out a lot of lightweight distros on my aged laptop, but TCL is the keeper. It’s an inspired paradigm, very slick, and keeps strictly to good old UNIX design values: each element should do one thing, and do it well.
So there it is. TCL on the laptop, and for now, my main machine keeps Windows. It’s not quite risk-free enough to switch wholeheartedly to Linux, but hopefully soon that will be completely viable.
