My love for Linux started WAY back with Caldera 1.0 and Red Hat 4.2. Back then Linux was, quite honestly, a huge challenge to work with. But when it did work it was magic. Sure the resolutions sucked. Oh yeah getting a modem that worked was next to impossible. Sound? If you’re lucky. But eventually you had everything going smooth and freaky-like.

That was then, this is now.

After many years of loyalty to Red Hat Linux we all had to jump the shark over to Fedora Core (that is if we wanted to continue with the layout of the land we had mined for so long.) Life with Fefora Core was, well, less than splendid simply because we were working within the confines of a “test-bed” operating system. Fedora Core’s initial mission was to roll out releases quickly and remain at the head of the pack as far as “cutting edge”. It did that for a long time. And with every new release you had to fight with getting hardware that had previously worked to work yet again. Sometimes getting your system back up (after an upgrade or fresh install of the latest-greatest) was certainly a task no Micro$oft admin would even consider undertaking. But for us Fedora folk, it had become par for the course.

After five releases of the Core I found myself with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth for Fedora. Red Hat had long since left behind the cuddly hacker it helped to primp and preen into post-puberty ‘l33tn3ss. The new, improved Red Hat was looking more and more like the M$ of the Linux community.

So where was a long-time Linux zealot to turn? Where else but a community of people who will ship you, free of charge, as many Ubuntu CDs as you wish just so you can spread the love. Yes, Ubuntu was the OS for me.

And not only did their world-hugging attitude attract me but so did the fact that the Ubuntu OS was the first to successfully get the broadcom chipsets used in the iBook airport cards to work. So I grabbed a copy of Kubuntu (the KDE version of Ubuntu) and loaded it up on my trusty white companion. And it did work so wonderfully. I was free to use the programs I had so long ago grown accustomed to using. Scribus.The Gimp.GnuCash. They all worked without the hassle of fink or darwin. I was one happy boy! Giddy, you might say.

And so, after many many years of sporting the Fedora redly, I have moved over to a fresher, debianier, huggier operating system. It’s a welcome back-to-the-future leap to how I originally felt about Linux. Now, I’m working with something special again.