The Old Tin Shed

OK another tech post.  About 7 weeks ago, I embarked on a mission to find a windows replacement desktop, one the works straight out of the box.  A operating system that is easy to set-up and doesn't require a computing degree or to use command prompts. For Linux editions this has pretty much been impossible.  I have tried most of the standard offering such as Ubuntu, Fedora, PC-BSD, etc and had issues with sound, printing, Skype and flash to mention a few.  Ubuntu has always been a strong contender, especially in the Kubuntu derivative. Now my PC is no monster with lots of specialist drivers required, I use a standard ASUS motherboard and an AMD CPU.  You would expect that most of the offerings would cope adequately with what I have but that is not the case. Linux still has to pull its finger out and get the basics right before they go redesigning the desktop, it seems stupid to me to get a user to use...

As you have probably gathered from my previous posts I have been doing a lot of investigating into the current Linux distributions and building 3 servers based around them. The server editions of Centos 6, have been stable and secure the way I expected them to.  To be honest now that we have the servers installed at the proprietary software running, I feel one hell of a lot less stressed about being hacked and viruses.  I have also been looking at a desktop distribution of Linux that I could replace my windows desktop with.  Therefore removing yet another entry point for hackers and or spy ware etc.  I mentioned BSD and it ran great as did quite a few others.  But I learnt some things you need to take into consideration before diving in. Do you have another machine for windows or can you dual boot for the programs that don't have a Linux version Are you prepared to try new programs What desktop do you want to run, as there are several out there. Try ...