It’s been 5 months since I made my last post and promised I would write more, so here it is since I’m still paying for the site to keep it open.

Recently I’ve been looking for a new operating system, because I want to try out something new. I’ve been using XP for the last decade (!) and I still love the way it’s built up and where everything is placed. I’ve also been using Windows 7 which looks really neat and is nice to use but it still feels a bit bloated and gets slow really fast (especially on a laptop).

As a (developing) software developer I seem to require a little more control over applications and settings than your average computer user. The kind of control that Windows does not appear to give me. When creating software and all the applications that go with that it feels to me that these applications naturally just blend in better with every OS not Windows.

I’m pretty open when it comes to OS’s, as long as it works fine for you and you can get the job done with it you should totally go for it and don’t let anyone tell you you should use another OS ’cause they think the one you’re using sucks.

So I wanted to try the much disputed Mac. It all looks great just like in Windows 7 and looks easy to use, maybe even a bit easier because they’re all into that usability and design stuff. All the applications I need for building applications are available for Mac as well and that’s why I really wanted to try it. I wanted to try to boost my productivity a bit by not having the ability to play games, for one, and secondly that it’s so easy to use and everything pretty much works out of the box. Sadly Mac’s come with a heavy price and I’m not easily fooled by this, they’re just too “exclusive” and this ups the price by about 150%. No thanks, I’d rather buy 10 second hand windows computers for half the price. And thus I still haven’t had the chance to try it out, trust me, I’ve tried .

So, with the obvious option blocked out there were another solution, the much-feared Linux (dramatic zoom). This pretty much has a reputation for being for computer geeks which kind of scares me off, it seems like this is really just a big tool that with countless options if you know how to use it. Having used Linux in school I only know some commands but boy I tell you, it’s a pretty deep rabbit hole.

They truly should make this OS just a major by itself (didn’t research if it exists). I totally respect the people who know a lot about it and can do nifty little things, but I think this is one of the reasons Linux is still lacking a lot behind on all other OS’s, which might be a good thing even.

Looking at all the distro’s down on distrowatch I didn’t want to go for the obvious choices like Linux Mint and Ubuntu (because I’m a non-conformist and what not) but went looking for a small distro that was well maintained and still looked great. In my quest I tried some distro’s on my VM and the unused partition on my desktop computer. I must say I learnt a lot just installing them and figuring out how to make all the parts work for my computer. The one that stayed most with me is Arch Linux; this truly is a powerful tool and one of the OS’s that comes closest to my mindset, building your own OS, choosing all components is just great! I fiddled with this for a few days, spent some hours using pacman and solving all the problems, looking at the different DE’s and WM’s and so forth.

This is the department in which I think Linux lacks most; user friendly and good looking UI’s. For me GNOME2 felt a bit too old school and GNOME3 wasn’t user friendly, KDE tried too much on the effects. That’s what I got to say about those two. If I’d have to chose I’d go for Gnome though, LXDE and Xfce4 looked a bit overdone, like they wanted to make it light but tried adding some cool style to it and it worked out very cheap.

Window Managers are pretty much all the same concept and I like the concept but for me this would take too much work to make it look good and I still think they’re not really usable. I don’t really want to become a Linux expert so I just tried it out.

In the end I just tried Ubuntu with it’s much disputed Unity, but I found that this is truly the best Linux in terms of usability and features. It’s easy to use and understand, there’s a lot of thins already pre-installed and it’s still a Linux under the hood and supports all of the applications I need. I think this is the closest they’ve ever gotten to making a Linux distro that can be shown and used by an ordinary computer user. It’s perfect for me and I think I’ll keep using it, but I’ll keep my XP if I ever wanted to squeeze in a game or something