I see lots of Linux reviews on the web, which isn't at all suprising considering how popular Linux is these days. Most of them suck pretty bad. It's not that the writers are bad. The reviews are just fundamentally wrong. Most of them will rave about how easy the distro in question is to install, and how nice everything looks once it's up.

Well shit. It's 2003. Linux hasn't been hard to install since the late 90s. And Linux has looked good for a few years now. It's pretty much the Easy to Install/Eye Candy king. We know this. I keep shaking my head over the fact that almost every review feels the need to spend 80% of the review going over the obvious.

I started with SuSE with version 7.1. Altho I've bought every version since then, I really haven't used them. I pretty much did the upgrade/build thing by hand.

Starting with 8.2, I'm not doing that anymore. It's a combination of the distros updating themselves so well that it's not necessary, and the fact that I just don't have the time anymore. So when I installed 8.2, I decided that I wasn't going to build anything by hand.

Jump forward 2 months, and I've pretty much held true to that. The main exception was Xmame... I figured if you're going to build anything by hand, that'd be it. SuSE did include a package, but why bother with that? When you have the option to custom compile a hardcore game like that for yourself, and optimize it for your setup, you'd be a fool not to.

Wine has come a long way over the last few years as well. It's no secret that Office and their ilk runs fine with it. I was suprised at the number of games that run these days. Half-Life seems to play just fine, and well... all the other games I play (Tribes2, UT) have linux versions available.

Finally, I don't think I could live without xine or kopete. They're the best media player and IM client I've used on any OS, without any doubt.

Ah Caldera. What the hell happened to you?

For the uninformed, years ago Caldera came out with what was the first Easy To Use and Install version of Linux. Ever. This was fairly signifigant, as at the time the only way Linux could be harder to install and maintain would have been if two large guys came and beat you with baseball bats when you were trying to install.

RedHat 5.2 anyone? You know what I'm talkin about!

Caldera blew them all away. They had a great installer, a great administration interface, and tested the hell out of everything. It was solid, stable and it just worked.

I stuck with Caldera until 2.4 came along, when they announced that they were stopping production of their OpenLinux product, and instead concentrating more on the enterprise market, joining the UnitedLinux consortium. And purchasing SCO.

The writing should have been on the wall when all of the uber-programmers from Caldera went to work for SuSE. I guess it was lost in the noise of the happyspeak and promises coming from SCO. Of course, some of it did come true. UnitedLinux/SuSE has really moved ahead of the pack in terms of quality.

But who knew SCO was going to try to bitchslap IBM? And in turn, get bitchslaped by Novell. So it looks like the SCO lawsuit is going to fade into oblivion, and what was once a really nice distro is going to end up a footnote in a book somewhere.

It didn't have to work out that way. Shame that it did.