Enjoying the World of Linux

I have not posted much during the month of May, so I will recap what I have been doing over the last month.  Today, I want to blog about Linux.  I have been using Linux since November of 2010.  Not very long because I had reservations switching to Linux on my computer, but a friend donated his older notebook computer to me in October, and I tried to get it running good again.  Sadly, the computer was so old and there were so many problems with Windows that I wasn’t sure if I could save it.  I wanted to do a clean install, but I did not have a Windows installation disc to reinstall, so my other option was installing a free operating system.  I had considered using Linux before, so it did not take me very long to go that route, but first I needed to find a distribution of Linux that would be good for a beginner.  After some research, I downloaded Ubuntu 10 and installed in on the computer.

I was amazed at how well the computer ran on Ubuntu 10.  The notebook is about 6 years old, and it ran like new.  I was excited to have a notebook running Linux, so I installed a bunch of open-source programs and started using it quite a bit.  I continued to use Windows on my desktop computer for school, but spent the rest of the time in the world of Linux.  Two months later, I decided to partition my Windows machine and install Ubuntu so I could dual boot the computer.  I loved it and was happy.

In February, I decided to venture out and experiment with other distributions of Linux.  Ubuntu worked well for me, but I wanted to see what else was out there, and I quickly found Linux Mint, which I fell in love with.  I thought it ran real well and had a familiar feel to the way it worked.  That is when I learned that Linux Mint is a variant of Ubuntu.  I laughed when I found that out.  However, I still enjoyed using it.

When the new Ubuntu came out earlier this year, I decided to give it a try.  I didn’t like the unity interface too well, so I went back to Linux Mint where I have stayed until recently.  When Linux Mint 11 came out, I noticed that my display on my notebook had some issues when I scrolled.  I did not mind it at first, but it started to affect my computing experience, so I decided to try another new version of Linux.  I heard a friend of mind mention openSUSE, so I went to the download page and downloaded it.

When I installed openSUSE, the first thing I noticed was that Ubuntu and Linux Mint had a more user friendly interface over the openSUSE installer, but I figured it out just fine.  I got it up and running with the KDE interface, and I must say that I am impressed.  I’ve dealt with Gnome since joining the world of Linux, so KDE is a new experience for me.  I think I like it over Gnome.  Things seem to run smoothly, but not as smoothly as Ubuntu 10 did.  Of course, nothing has run as smooth as Ubuntu 10 did for me on my notebook computer.  I’m not sure if that is just me not knowing how to configure Linux real well or what, but I do not mind too much.

First impressions of openSUSE:  The configuration was a little tricky to figure out at first.  I’m not sure if it’s the category setup or where it hides, but I spent about 15 minutes trying to find the screensaver options before going online to find out where it was at.  I have not had to use the online help so quickly before for something as simple as the screensaver options, so I was a little worried about that.  I thought that if I had that much trouble with just the screensaver that I might have even more trouble down the road, but I have not.  The only other hiccup I had was with my wireless card.  Once I had everything installed, I connected to the wireless router and the network manager stated that I was connected, but then nothing would a load.  A simple reboot fixed that issue.

I have not had a chance to spend too much time with the new OS just yet, but I plan to install some programs that I like to use next and see how easy that is.  I’ll write another post sharing my experiences of that and how I am doing at adjusting to openSUSE.  I’m still learning, so I expect some mistakes along the way, but that is all a part of the learning process.

Also I am open to trying other distributions of Linux.  If you have one to suggest, reply to this post and share it.  Explain why you like it and how it compares with the distributions I have tried if you have tried them as well.  I’ll read over the comments and see if there is one that I may want to try next.

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