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Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Last night I fired up Update Manager and told it to go ahead and take me to Ubuntu's latest. (This is on my home computer, an aging HP Pavilion a520n, 512 megs of RAM.) It took all night and most of the next day to download everything. But I did zero customizing. Just hit Go.

And here's the bottom line. It's good, it works, it's pretty fast, and it seems a little prettier and smoother.

I've written this before, but I'm always impressed by Linux for this: I've been mucking about on this same computer with Linux since May 15, 2004. That would be almost 6 years ago. Since then, I've replaced the operating system and applications maybe 10 times. I'm running cutting edge stuff these days, carrying all my historic files (email, text bases, contacts, etc.). No viruses. No Trojans. No malware of any kind. And it's free.

I could go into other stuff, but really, what matters is that anybody who uses a computer can use Ubuntu, and absent some unique applications, will probably do just fine.

Incidentally, I also was playing around with the Netbook Remix, booting it from a jump drive on my Acer Aspire, and that looked pretty good, too, although I found that it booted much slower than the native Linpus. Moreover, the old Linpus was notorious for breaking when one tried to upgrade Firefox from 2.something.

But the Aspire forum gave me a work around. I upgraded Firefox, and found myself still pretty happy with Linpus, so stayed with it.

At work, I'm using Windows XP, which is (yawn) OK, although I've noticed that sometimes I just have to reboot to get things to work correctly.

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