Several years ago I decided to investigate Linux. I down loaded about 90% of the major varieties and loaded them. A lot of them wouldn’t even load on my machines! As most of my computer work is now business oriented I was looking for a stable and ultra secure OS. I haven’t had a systems crash or lost data since migrating to Linux. I know. You’re saying but Debian Stable is running old software. Ain’t no big deal! I’m old and am still operating quite well. I was looking for a flavor that would work well as a unit and wouldn’t pose too much of a learning curve. Granted that the first couple of generations of Debian had some problems. Woody had some problems with my equipment in it’s discovery routines but nothing that a little reading and tweaking wouldn’t take care of. With a move to Sarge I began to notice the curve to take care of some of the little bumps and the Debian team began smoothing the rough edges off of the software. Moving on to Etch I watched them really start to address the problems of newer architecture!

I am now running Lenny and have found it to be everything that I need or could presently wish for! I love the file security, the multi-user format and the way it looks. I still feel a trend for the Gnome desktop to be the norm but I have usually thrown KDE at it. KDE looks, feels and acts a little more like the Windows OS and hey, like I said, I cut my teeth on Uncle Billy’s stuff. I also love certain things about Debian that windows doesn’t seem to want to address. Little things like multiple desktops. Since we all multi-task, it’s nice to have 5 or 6 desktops to separate our different work projects with out having to reboot into another user. All of my web type work can be running on a desktop with word processing on another and still another desktop to pop over to if I need to do a little down and dirty CLI work! I usually have a bunch of programs running and at least my desktop or my panels aren’t all cluttered up.