Another day, another distro.

Well, not exactly. I've made forays into the Linux world with RedHat (pre-Fedora), Mandrake (pre-stupid lawsuit) and Ubuntu (Dapper or Edgy, I can't remember). OpenSUSE 10.3 (GNOME interface)--Novell's alms--was the smoothest installation I've had so far. I had to replace the network card for Mandrake. Ubuntu never did get along with the extra-large monitor, and there were issues with the machine not wanting to boot, which hasn't [crossing toes] happened thus far with OpenSUSE.

And--wonder of wonders--it came with the Java Development Kit pre-bundled. For someone who still qualifies as a "stupid noob," that was a delightful bonus. No having to figure out where this particular flavor of Linux keeps its config. files and hoping that I don't stuff something up by hacking in a couple new environment variables. No being bitten by the little "gotcha" that I had on Ubuntu because of OpenOffice. Considering that the new machine will be used for writing software (mostly in the Java programming language), this alone darned near made me Snoopy-dance.

But I had a minor epiphany after my initial configuration/customization: The jihad flame-wars that are waged over distributions of Linux suddenly made sense, not from the standpoint of nerd elitism, but generic human nature.

To wit: If operating systems were religions, UNIX would be Catholicism--not much variation on the basic doctrine. Linux, by the same metaphor, would be Protestantism--with all the tendencies to splinter into new branches. And like Protestantism from the Luther/Calvin glory days on down, each sect views every other sect as a mouth-breathing rabble of heretics. ;-)

After being burned by the last distribution (actually a recommended add-on that "fixed" my chunky screen resolution by destroying my ability to use anything but a command-prompt), I'm postponing the migration over from my four-year-old Windows computer until I've run through a few updates, particularly for the kernel and hardware drivers.

But for now, it's a new toy to play with--and many thanks to Dearest for assembling it! I'm typically pretty diligent about backing up data, so I won't lose everything if the thing crashes and I move onto the next great distribution. And so I'll offer my cautious and qualified kudos to Novell for demonstrating that for-profit and open-source don't have to be mutually exclusive. I can only hope that they have the wit to treat their developers well, and continue putting out a product that's doesn't make even a stupid noob feel stupid while using it.