well… almost
i rescued a dead laptop from a friend of mine looking to just toss it out the window - no pun intended - as windows was completely hosed on the system and the battery needs replacing. so i told him that i would take it off his hands as he wanted to get a new one anyway. now this laptop is a few years old. think it had an original xp install on it. not even sp1! wow talk about not the fastest chicken crossing the road here.
so i took this little beasty home and happily wiped out xp and installed ubuntu linux. took a bit of doing since the battery is dead and no wireless card. so i have this thing siting on my coffee table hard wired to the router and plugged into the wall.
ubuntu linux is completely free to download though it my take a few tries to down the whole program without any network packet errors so make sure you check sum the file one you get it all down. i have been messing with linux off and on for a few months now. i do have to say it is a very decent piece of os software. i do not recommend it for the casual user to mess with. if you would like to have a pc running linux, have your local linux geek install it for you. but once you get it up and running (well ubuntu is the only linux ive been using) it is actually a wonder to use. oh it might not be os.x pretty - God i wish it was - but it is very functional. updates are a breeze and i have had no problems with it since installing. and this is just an old laptop. i can only imagine what it would be like on a full blown quad core system with a billion gigs of ram and the whole drooling 9 yards of computer geekieness……
the down side is that i cannot run some of my favourite apps on it like adobe photoshop or dreamweaver. it is great though to surf the internet, listen to pandora - the most brilliant online radio site ever! - radio, write documents with open office, and so on.
is linux the way of the future? probably not. but it is far more stable than windows and far far far cheaper than os x. now there are a few of you that might say os x is cheaper than windows vista premium nipple rubbing edition. i say HA! not when you have to have a ac to run the damn thing. now granted macs ar very nice systems and i do highly recommend them, i just can bring myself to fork out the 1000+ dollars american to run a nice os like os x. id rather run it on my current system then to have to buy a whole new sytem.
now the cool thing about linux is that it was free. all the office apps that come with it are free. pandora radio is free (ok you dont need linux to run that, just work with me here). google is free. the laptop i put it on was free.
what more could you ask for?
~adieu