All the PCs that I am using are now currently on Linux, the only time that I will be using Windows will be at work . It has taken me a considerably long time to actually get settled on a certain distribution for my Laptop, the fact that Ubuntu 6.06 wasn’t up to date enough for me to bother trying to update each individual bit that was needed and 7.04 had a tendency to crash 80% of the time on boot up meant I was forced to try the 7.10 developer release. The surprise that it worked much better then the other two despite that fact and the odd program crash.

I have now compiled the 2.6.22.1 kernel with tickless idle (woot!) and also Code::Blocks IDE  a couple of nights ago. Total compile time was 4 hours, 4 HOURS! However, the wait did pay off, I now have a stable, quieter and cooler laptop and my favourite IDE running on Linux .

Something did perk my interest yesterday though and it was the Gentoo based distro Sabayon. If the Live CD test goes well, I will probably try a dual boot to see if I can actually handle the source based installation processes for programs.

After using Ubuntu fully for a day, overall I am pretty pleased that I made the switch. There is such a large community support for the distro that it makes finding out how to do anything fairly simple. So far, I have everything the way that I want it with media shares and day to day tasks. As of now, I only have two things bugging me:

• The lack of a tickless kernel
• Needing to recompile Code::Blocks (my main IDE) from scratch

The formal I will be recompiling tonight hopefully and the latter I wish I didn’t have to do.  I will probably give a more fuller review of the distro at the end of the week.

Seriously, I really can’t believe there isn’t a laptop friendly distro for Linux yet. I have spent two nights and 4 distro downloads just to get one that ‘nearly’ works.

• Ubuntu/Kbuntu 7.04 – When it worked, the laptop support was really good and the distro is user friendly. However, it only booted 1/5 of the time, every other time it dies on bootup during XServer somewhere.
• OpenSuse 10.2 – This was easy to install but from a user point of view, was a pain to use. Couldn’t work out how to install new software and the display settings GUI stopped working after the first time. Not a good start.
• Ubuntu 6.06 – This was the one that I settled for in the end, as with 7.04, still very easy to use but the fan on the laptop stays on all the time. Hopefully this should be fixable but the noise is distracting.

No wonder people stick with Windows :/.