linux

This week I decided to give Ubuntu 10.10 with GNOME a whirl, tempted by a brief glimpse of it on a friends' computer looking much prettier than my Debian desktop running KDE. I've been using Linux for a long time now and while it works well for me both as a server OS and on the desktop I've become very cautious about recommending it to non technically minded friends, could Ubuntu change my mind?

When I first started playing with Linux I was working in Windows technical support so I knew that system very well, by that I mean I knew when confronted by a particular problem clicking certain buttons in a particular order would fix it. I backed up this knowledge with an imaginary mind world where I imagined what the programs were doing when I clicked their buttons. Of course Windows is closed source software so unless you're a programmer working for Microsoft you could never really know what those buttons were doing but my imaginary world still seemed remarkably effective at helping to fix real problems.