Today marks the third part of the geek-trifecta that was underway as Canonical released the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. One of the most popular desktop distributions of Linux, like it’s brethren Ubuntu is free to download, burn to a CD and install on your computer. On the desktop it is generally thought of us a replacement for Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X.
Now I know that last week I was excited about the release of Windows 7 and I’m always excited about my Macs (well, for the most part) but I have a special place in my heart for Ubuntu as well. There is a part of me that is suspicious of all things corporate. I don’t like not knowing what my computer is doing, how it’s doing it and who it’s telling my business to. I have a bit of an issue with Facebook and Google in this regard as well as I don’t quite fully trust “the cloud” yet, but with Linux you can see all the source code that makes up the operating system if you wish, so there is nothing to hide. There are no hidden switches, no secrets calls and no privileged code in Linux and to me that can only be a beautiful thing. Not only are bugs discovered faster, they are squashed even faster than that. And by the way, viruses are not an issue on Linux.
I’m going to install Ubuntu tonight on one of the non-Macs here in the house. I’ll probably yak on about how it went in a couple of days.
By the way, in the picture at the top of this entry I was enjoying my hot chocolate in my Ubuntu Linux mug. I have contemplated getting that symbol as a tattoo as a branding of my geekiness.
