Geek Speaks

I've been doing some thinking recently on how GNU/Linux, KDE, and Open Source Software changed since I hopped on board about 1.75 years ago and as my main OS for about 1.5 years. I first started with Linux when my cousing gave me a old laptop with Gentoo 2004.2 on it. I used it some, but still prefered Windows until the spring of 2005. My cousin Josh Nisly helped me install SuSE 9.2 Professional on my computer. I started using SuSE as my main Operating System than. The first several months were full of reboots back to Windows XP. Now my only reboots are for an occasional Windows-only gaming session. Those became fewer and fewer and fewer till I finally decided to nuke WinXP. That didn't last for long, and I reinstalled it. That happened several times. I am currently running *ONLY* Linux and have decided not to even install Windows anymore. I have made it for about a month. I have VMWare installed, but fortunately I haven't even needed to run Windows virtually yet since my full time switch. When I first started with Linux, Firefox and Thunderbird were in 1.03, KDE was in 3.2, OOo was in 1.1.3. I have seen many improvements in the past almost two years. Firefox and Open Office have matured wonderfully. Opera has impressed me recently as well. It is a nice interface, but I still prefer Firefox. If Opera had half the extensions of Firefox I would make the switch, but it doesn't. Now for My OS Tomorrow. I don't think that Windows has anythign to do with my future, at least I hope so. It has disappointed me many times and I don't think I will ever install Windows Vista. The Beta disappointed me horribly! Mac OS X has impressed me, but the lack of configurability is disapointing. I think Linux will always be installed on my computer. My only fear that I have is that Linux will go the way of Unix. By that I mean some distros not compatable with others, and I can see that happenning right now. We have our .deb, .rpm, .tgz based distros etc, and an rpm can't be installed on a Ubuntu, Gentoo, Slackware, etc without a third party tool such as alien. I don't know but right now I can definitely say that my Operating System can Beat up your Operating System.