It’s the Little Things

Posted on October 21, 2003

Well, a couple of days ago I took the plunge and did something I’ve been meaning to for a long time: I set up a Linux partition on my home PC. I’ve generally been happy with Windows 2000 for home use, but I’ve been wanting to explore Linux as a desktop OS for awhile (I get plenty to exposure to it on servers at work, but that’s all through terminal windows, not through pretty GUIs like KDE and GNOME), so it just seemed like time to bite the bullet and do it. Thanks to PartitionMagic and Red Hat 9, the whole process was relatively painless and I was up and running in a couple of hours. Red Hat has done an excellent job of taming the Linux install process, that’s for sure.

Anyway, I boot into RH for the first time and what strikes me right away is that everything looks so incredible! It’s the magic of anti-aliased text, which Linux and Mac OS X users take for granted but which Microsoft has decided you have to upgrade to XP to get on Windows — if you stayed on 2000, no soup for you! It’s incredible how much of a difference it makes. Dammit, I’ve been refusing to make the XP upgrade for something like two years now (I hate the whole XP “product activation” scheme, it’s a nightmare for tweakers like me who routinely swap hardware in and out of their box), but I’m posting this from Mozilla under Red Hat and it’s so much nicer looking than Moz under Win2000 that I’m wondering if maybe I should rethink my XP stance. Hmm… principles… anti-aliased text… principles… anti-aliased text…

Next challenge: figuring out how to install the @()# Linux drivers for my video card. This oughta be a hoot…