Rumours of its demise appear to be a bit previous to the event. Yesterday, out of curiosity I turned it on and it booted, admittedly only seeing 64Mb of RAM, and incidentally proving that Crunchbang linux will run with a window manager in 64Mb albeit rather slowly.
Reseating the memory cured that, and there it was, back in the land of the living. Its apparent demise coincided with a weekend of exceptionally heavy rain in Canberra, and I suspect it just got damp, even though the garage apparently remained dry.
The question of course, is how long will it continue to be with us, and whether this was an indication of mortality …
In the meantime, despite my initial disquiet about being reassimilated by the borg, I have come to appreciate the strengths of Windows 7 and the advantages of using a mainstream operating system, for despite the growing popularity of OS X it simply doesn’t have the penetration of Microsoft operating systems.
Linux on the desktop remains an oxymoron, despite its great power and versatility. Despite the similarities in window managers between Windows 7 and Gnome, people are more comfortable with the Microsoft environment, and with installing software within it.
And until either a major vendor seriously backs it, or there is a must have killer app that exists only on Linux, desktop linux will remain the preserve of a few oddballs like myself.
1 comment:
annoyingly - only because I'd decided it was going to be with us for some time and had just bought a kvm switch to share monitor, keyboard and mouse with a new scrapheap machine I've acquired it's died again ...
Post a Comment