Looking back at a year with Linux.
The other day I was talking to my dad in the car. He was mentioning some things that were currently broken on his SAAB. He then mentioned that among SAAB drivers, SAAB stands for Something Almost Always Broken. I thought this to be contradictory because I know he loves that car, and he replied that the fun was in tracking down the broken stuff and fixing it.
I couldn’t help but see this as an analog to Linux. Fortunately, computer problems are much more mundane than problems with large hunks of metal moving at high speeds. Still, I agreed with him, as things breaking is part of the fun.
Linux is at the market share where it does not receive the same kind of attention from mainstream developers, or that ugly monster that is hardware drivers and compatibility. This is where most problems seem to lie.
Today I was trying to run a Java Web Start Application. Normally this is done seamlessly by the ubiquitous Java Runtime Environment. However, when I tried, nothing happened. So I went and prayed to the great Google in the sky, and it sent me an answer. Sun’s 64-bit version of the JRE for Linux didn’t work for some reason. So the blog post succintly showed me how to get the 32-bit version and run it without clashing with the default JRE. Worked like a charm.
Most of the time I don’t have to fix anything with Linux. However, problems do arise, and some of them would be totally bewildering to the average Windows or Mac user. I’m not going to go into a you-should-switch diatribe, but I will write about my first experiences with conversion soon (hopefully).
My first year with Linux? Awesome. Never going back. Stuff like that. Yeah.