Well I'm typing this from Fedora Core 2, and I gotta say, I am impressed. Linux has definitely improved since I last played around with. When I first installed Linux some three years ago, it was quite simply a nightmare. There was no chance of any but the most basic hardware getting detected. This included my monitor, video card, sound card and mouse (!!) being for all intents and purposes the bare minimum models required in a computer system. I had to manually go in an edit files like /etc/fstab and run strange commands like xfree86config to get things to work, and they never really did.

But now, Fedora detects (nearly) everything straight off the bat, no problems at all - I boot to a beautiful Gnome desktop with 1280x1024 resolution in 32-bit glory, and I didn't have to do a thing. Gone are the days of guessing your horizontal and vertical sync ranges, and the warning that providing a wrong range can cause permanent damage to your monitor. Amazingly enough, with a little coaxing, it was even able to get my wireless network going. Although, I must say, Knoppix did a far better job in that I literally did nothing and everything worked. But still, compared to earlier Red Hat distros, the improvement is remarkable (well duh, it's been 3 years!).

That's all a good thing, right? Well, although it is nice, it sort of lessens the view of Linux as the OS of the true techie, in that you don't have to muck around anymore. Lots of things now have nice GUI interfaces and installers, and so the experience is a lot like Windows. Before, it was clear that you were in another OS - the dark console screen, waiting to see what tons of errors you were going to get, now that's an atmosphere!

Of course, you can still work at this level if you want to. I mean hey, they can't force you to do everything with a GUI, right? But once you're exposed to the ease of use (in most cases) of the GUI approach, it's hard to go back. Having said that, a fair few GUIs offer far too little control over settings, and so sometimes you'll be forced to get your hands dirty. For instance, Fedora can't read NTFS partitions, so if I want to read my Windows partition from here, I'm going to have to install a separate package and (presumably) muck around with config files. Sounds like fun!

It remains to be seen how the various dependencies for packages are handled by Fedora, because last time I used Linux it was a pain having to download a program only to be told upon compilation that it required three not-installed libraries to run, and those librarires would in turn require more libraries..I'm trying to think why this is different to the Windows case. I suppose the open-source nature of Linux means that there are a lot more freely available libraries, which means that there has been a lack of structure in the way they have been used, in the sense that there are many different libraries available and in many cases there isn't a standard way of doing things. Actually, come to think of it, I think that's changing (was it ever the case in the first place? Or more ignorance on my part?).

I guess it may seem like I am being totally contradictory, and in a sense I am. It's great that Linux is becoming more user-friendly, but I still would like to relive the Linux that is the rite of passage among techies, just for the heck of it. "Then why don't you", you ask? Because my first priority is to test out Linux and see how feasible it is to use it on a daily basis. Work (hah, what work?) first, play later, as they say.