Last week my wife’s laptop started dying; for the record, it still is. In the interest of full disclosure, I love Linux. I don’t have a computer in this house running windows natively, though I do use windows on a virtual box to run Photoshop CS4  and Adobe Camera Raw. I also have countless virtual machines of windows (and other linux distros) for testing purposes–as a consultant I work a lot with windows, but it’s not the OS for me. I’m not a apple fanboy either, I’m a red hat guy: servers run CentOS, desktops run Fedora.

My wife doesn’t mind Fedora, but she’s switched to Ubuntu for the last few years on her laptop. She’s an English teacher at a state college and uses Linux and Open office, how great is that? How many College English teachers do you know that accept papers in Open Document format? Oh and the other day when I was watching the trailers for the new Halo 3 ODST, she may have been more excited then I was. I think we’ll end up playing ALL of the other Halo games through again before ODST comes out. For those of you who were wondering, no, my wife playing Halo has nothing to do with any of this… My wife chooses to use Linux and Open Office, she LOVES Halo… Just wanted you to know how lucky I am. If you were in my shoes wouldn’t you tell everyone?

Anyway, her part time job is online tutoring. So when her laptop started dying I needed to get her a desktop up and running as a backup. She had the choice between two computers I also gave her the choice of Windows XP, Ubuntu or Fedora and assuming she chose Linux the choice between Gnome and KDE. Read the rest of this entry »