With Yet Another Linux Blog silently turning 4 years old this past December, I began to examine what I’ve posted over the years and have tried to take a step back to examine what I’ve accomplished here…first, from a design perspective. Please understand that these links go to the internet archive so they may take a while to load:
- How Yet Another Linux Blog looked in 2004
- 1st Major Redesign of YALB – Happened around April 2006.
- 2nd Major Redesign of YALB – Around August 2006
- 3rd Major Redesign of YALB – Happened around February 2007
- Current State of Redesign – how the blog looks on the date of this post, March 18, 2009.
Next, I looked at some of my most popular posts. Most of these were written quite a while ago. 2 of them are reviews, one is an opinion piece and the last 2 are how-to’s:
- Enlightenment e17 Review (an older review done by guest editor Misunderstruck)
- ClarkConnect, Enterprise Linux for the Home. A Review of version 3.2
- Installing Extra Themes and Icons in PCLinuxOS
- What Sets PCLinuxOS Apart from Others?
- KDE and XOrg, Fonts and DPI
- Host Your Own Webserver at Home
And then, there are the most commented articles. The winner here is Ubuntu articles…but that’s a dubious honor in my opinion as most of the comments weren’t particularly friendly:
- Why Ubuntu ISN’T for New Users – Done in 2006 and why I felt at the time, Ubuntu didn’t offer new users the best out of box experience.
- Ubuntu 5.04 Final Rating – An experiment where I took my wife and made her use Linux for a week and give each distro a rating. Ubuntu bombed on this one. Of course, the community came back with lots of name calling and “why didn’t you do this dummy” to help her as a new user. To this day she despises Ubuntu for the comments left there by their community members.
- Enlightenment e17 Review – Once again, guest editor Misunderstruck’s review of e17. Lot’s of positive feedback and some questions.
- Is Ubuntu CE Needed? – I questioned what the point of having a separate distro versus a Meta-Package. If you recall the release of Ubuntu CE, you’ll remember that there was some controversy surrounding the motivation of doing this as well as a quick release of Ubuntu Satanic Edition.
- Why Open Source Isn’t Succeeding – My take on what made open source fall short of achieving its goal…in 2004
- Why Open Source Isn’t Succeeding, Part II – A follow up and clarification of the first article…done so boneheads that “don’t read too good” could understand “more better” what the article intended.
It’s been many years, many reviews, many editorials, and many blog revisions. Through it all, I’ve tried to stay focused on what matters to me…sharing knowledge with others. I don’t have any plans to stop blogging and am looking at starting another blog soon that covers Windows administration stuff as well (I work in a mixed environment of Unix/Linux/Windows now as a server admin). I feel that even if the software isn’t free, the knowledge on how to use it should be. Thanks for reading!
So, what would you consider the most newbie-friendly current Linux distribution?
I often think of that. I use Debian for myself, but while it's far easier to handle than it was when I first tried it 7 years ago, it's still not for a casual newbie. I have OpenSUSE installed on one of my disk partitions to see how that holds up, and it's generally good. But even then I'm unsure if I would recommend it.
PCLinuxOS? Mepis? Something else? I'm kicking around the idea of getting an extra hard drive to install different distributions to try them out, just so that if I actually COULD convince a friend to try Linux, I'd have a reasonably good recommendation I could stand behind.
Ever since this: http://linux-blog.org/experiment-final-head-to-he…
I always recommend PCLinuxOS for new users. The control center alone is reason enough…but the distro just makes it easier for windows converts and those new to Linux to gain confidence with Linux. I recommend PCLinuxOS over all other distros.
If you read the post I linked to above, you'll notice that's my wife…we had just been married when I put her through that…she didn't know much about my "linux" thing. She just needed something to get things done. So that truly is a good indicator (even if it's older) of a new user perspective.
Hope this helps 🙂
It does, thank you. I saw that PCLinuxOS has a new version, I'll check it out. I found your blog after experimenting with Foresight myself, and I hope it improves.