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Linux is Fun

November 8, 2006 · by Scott Fradkin

I’m a huge fan of Linux. I’ve been using a Linux desktop as my primary OS for about three years now.

Call me crazy. Call me a glutton for punishment. I enjoy it.

I realized a few years back that there just wasn’t a need to use Windows anymore. Everything that I really use on a computer has a Linux equivalent (well, almost… but there are ways around that). So, I made the big switch.

I started out using one of the older versions of Mandrake (now Mandriva if I remember correctly). Unfortunately, Mandrake had a tendency to corrupt itself on my computer, so after the third or fourth time of starting for scratch, I decided to look at a different distro. One of my brother in-laws who also uses Linux as his desktop OS had tried out a distro called Gentoo. I checked it out and have been using it ever since.

Gentoo is an interesting distro with an interesting philosophy: everything should be built from source on your machine. The upside is that everything runs fast. The downside is that it can sometimes take a long time to compile packages depending upon your processor speed.

The package manager, Portage, is top notch. It does a great job at managing dependencies and performing the builds through a glorified scripting system called ebuilds. Gentoo can be kind of heady, though. There is a ton of documentation and a really great community surrounding it, but it’s still not as simple as other distros to get things to work. You’re routinely editing scripts and config files to make things work.

I don’t mind it. I’ve currently got three machines running Gentoo (soon to be four). It runs really well on low-memory and low-processing speed machines.

So, what’s the point? The point is that as a Java developer there’s no need to be tied down to the Microsoft world view. Java works just as well on Linux as on Windows. Eclipse runs great on Linux. (If you really want to use it, WSAD is available also)

Developing on a Linux box is so much snappier than on a Windows box. (Disclaimer: I do not run a full Desktop Environment such as Gnome or KDE)

The nice thing is that if you absolutely need Windows for something, you can always run it inside VMware. VMware Server is now a free product. It works spectacularly well.

Give Linux a shot. The more people try it out, the better the OS and the various desktop environments will get. This is critical to give Microsoft and Apple a bit of competition in their arenas.

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Linux is Fun

November 8, 2006 · by Scott Fradkin

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