10 years on, the saga draws to a close...

[Dr. Z]

One crisp morning in 1997, when I was just 10 years old my dad returned home with a copy of Personal Computer World. It was an inch-thick volume of fascinating reading but the best bit was the CD on the front, for it contained two very special goodies - OS/2 Warp and Linux. OS/2 Warp didnt really seem appealing, so onto my 486 DX66 went Linux.

Since that day, I have been using Linux on and off on at least one of my PCs - predominantly on whatever I have been using as my server box. However, as the last 12 months have rolled on I have been asking more and more of it and gradually the rewards for the effort required have dwindled away. I know that quite a lot of it comes down to lack of knowledge in certain areas, but I live with a certified UNIX geek (he managed to talk his way into a placement in the Sun R&D thingamy) and even he has started to get annoyed.

To be fair to the underdog, we are asking an awful lot from it. We are asking it to route at wirespeed on a gigabit lan across multiple VLANS as well as handling all the rest of our crazy projects but its just letting us down

So, Linux will remain on my faithful router box handling all my silly networking projects but I will be moving to a windows server solution because it just works. OK, so I might not be able to tackle things in a command prompt/config file to iron out a crease with the speed and simplicity that I am used to with Linux, but at least I wont suffer from hugely annoying niggling issues that make no sense at all. My ubergeek housemate feels the same way. He lives on the top floor, I live 2 floors down on the bottom floor and even through 3 closed doors I can still hear the shouts of frustration as another stupid, stupid problem crops up.

As for my main machine - for me, Linux lost the current round of the "battle for the desktop" the day Vista was released. I am sat here looking at Vista with Ubuntu next to me and it looks as dated to me as windows 3.1 did alongside 95. Against XP it was a fair contender I felt - Its performance rocked and it wasnt lagging dreadfully in the visual stakes but vista has shifted things and, well, it will take a lot for me to move back again...

EDIT:

Hmm, the dates are wrong. I installed linux in 1997 onto that 486 box, but I distinctly remember getting Linux on CD shortly after (my parents) buying the machine, which would have been in 1994/5. So its a bit longer than 10 years...