Now, as far as computers go, I’m not the techincal type, I’m certainly no programmer, but I’m not computer illiterate either. I’m somewhere in between. Back when I still had hope of getting a job I described my computer skills as “above average”, meaning that I use a computer for more than just looking at web pages and reading email. I’ve been using my computer for DJing ever since my turntable became obsolete and the hard drive is full of about 12,000 mp3s — all legal (mostly). I draw cartoons, now with the aid of a computer, so there are lots of pictures stored on my hard drive. I enjoy writing and there are primitive versions of the pages you see on this website (and many you haven’t seen yet). I also like to collect whole books that are in the public domain, which is unnecessary, really, now that the internet is what it is. I have several that aren’t public domain as well, and I do recording (music and otherwise), so suffice it to say, I use my computer for everything. I will also add that my computer is nearly 8 years old, so it is no longer state-of-the-art as it was when Jeff and I first put it together.

Being poverty-stricken, I’m all for free software so I thought I’d give Linux a try. I admit I’d had certain preconceptions about Linux: that it was developed by basement computer nerds, that it was decades behind Micro$oft, and that there were deficiencies in the software when compared to the expensive brands. In all fairness, some of those preconceptions were true, but Linux does have some advantages. Number one, it’s free, and I don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars every couple of years on updates (think of the film Robots), and supposedly, Linux isn’t susceptible to computer “viruses” the way Windows is. Linux enthusiast can list you many many more advantages, I'm sure. From my brief experience, I can tell you that editing pictures in the motherf#@kin' G.I.M.P. (as I call it) is way way superior to Micro$oft’s Paintbrush. But since I’m just an end-user and still new to Linux and my computer is aging gracefully, but rapidly, that’s all I can tell you.

I can tell you that there is vast room for improvement, and by “vast” I mean the Grand Canyon . . . on Mars! No, I'm kidding, it’s not that bad, and most of my problems are rather small but they are numerous. I installed Linux version SUSE 10.2 and immediately nothing worked. Amarok and Kopete are a joke — a bad joke. I couldn’t listen to music, I still can't send text messages to mobile devices such as a phone, and my brand new printer/scanner is now useful only as a boat anchor. I’ve compared installing Linux to buying a car. You get the frame, the body (blue), and the engine. The rest of the parts you have to find and install yourself. Some use Imperial measurements, some are metric, and some are, like, Klingon, or something. It’s like a damn scavenger hunt — with no list. There are manuals available online (thankfully, my browser works, for text anyway), but they’re not written in plain English and are absolutely incomprehensible. It seems to me that there are at least two or three different names for everything. If you check different sources they all seem to be saying different things. They all may be saying the same thing or they may not be. It’s impossible to tell. (Apparently YaST and YaST 2 are the same thing — the 2 has no meaning, I guess.)

The biggest unresolvable issue for me is this problem of “permission”. Most of my mp3s are “owned” (or should I say “pwned”) by this mysterious entity known as “root”, whoever that is, and I just cannot get permission to put them into the folders I want or even rename them. That’s a big issue, actually; the rest of them are relatively small. I've been wrestling with that issue for 10 months now (the first 2 months were devoted to getting my computer to just play mp3s). Steaming audio and video from websites is hit-or-miss, usually miss, so a lot of the time that’s just not doable. I went through and set all the settings the way I like them, but either they don’t work or they don’t stay where I set them. I can’t play videos at all. After the battle to get mp3s to work, I gave up on videos. Some of the smaller issues included this stupid bouncing cartoon icon next to the pointer (I hunted that damn thing down and killed it right away), the buttons on the taskbar keep moving around, (I never know where they will be when I need them and they all start with K). The menu pops up if you accidentally mouse-over it and won't go away. I have to enter my password for everything, even to set the clock (because it won’t set itself), and I could go on and on and on and on.

Well, that pretty well sums up my first year with Linux. I don’t hate it enough to go back to Windows, and Jeff tells me there are better versions than SUSE (I pronounce it es-yoo-es-ee). There’s gotta be something better than the version I’m using. So I’ll try staring down the barrel of something else for a while and see what comes out of it.