I type this from my Linux box

Back in my university days, I managed to salvage a 1 GHz computer from the dumpster. The PC box already had 512 MB ram and a video card. A few more weeks of checking out the dumpster later, I managed to find other scrapped computers to salvage a sound card, a network card and a 12 GB HD and I would have a fully working computer... which I ended up donating to a friend of mine that didn't have a computer at the time.

Well right before leaving university, he didn't need the computer anymore and I bought it with me to my new home where I bought a new 19" LCD to go with the system an installed Ubuntu (a very easy to setup Linux distribution) on the computer. The desktop looks something like this:


My Desktop while getting some music going.

The distribution comes complete with Open Office which is a suite complete with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation preparation programs. All of this comes free with the operating system and can be easily installed into other systems as well. Linux comes complete with programming tools, program editors with the option to add a whole slew of software for free.

The desktop side of Linux is becoming very attractive, especially for those with good video cards to go with their computer (though most of it is just eye candy... it's also very pleasing eye candy). The desktop is managed by a piece of software developed from the Compiz Fusion project, which was a project to develop an incredibly beautiful/slick desktop environment. Check out the following link for a video demonstration. It just goes to say that you done necessarily need Windows for a decent working environment. The best part of it all is that all of this software, and more comes for free and all the code on how to write these programs are publicly available should you be interested in doing some programming of your own.

Windows and the together already costs atleast $200 or more, then throw in any other software that you might be interested in and you are probably looking at $1000 more in costs for installed software on the computer. If you want an image editor, programming environment, HTTP server or anything, all of this can be had for for free just by downloading the software you want from an online software repository. Simple as that and you'd be saving yourself $1200+ in software that easy.

Though, I think the biggest hang up of using Linux is that there might be one piece of software that might not be available on Linux. Well fear not, there exists a piece of software that can interpret Windows programs and have it run on a Linux OS. That piece of software is other wise known as "wine." All one needs to do is install it and have it run the program of your choice. Simple as that.

I do have to admit that I am still a little uncertain of gaming on a Linux box with the standard titles out there, but I have heard from some people that many usual Windows games are playable through the Wine emulator software (and I heard that it runs fast enough that there isn't any significant slowdown of the game).

Most likely, I will be upgrading this computer later on (or rather rebuilding the whole thing) with much slicker hardware to take play around with the Linux OS. So far, I am quite impressed.