Occasional Thoughts

I did a comparison of favourite distributions and the result shows a clear trend towards Ubuntu, while the interest in all other distributions declines. However please also note that this might also indicate that a lot of people use Ubuntu and have problems with Ubuntu and are looking for help. Personally I believe its a combination of both. First there is a high interest. On the other hand there are excellent resources for Ubuntu and people know that Google is of great help for Ubuntu problems, while I wasn't able to get so much help from Google for SuSE problems in the past.

Google Trends comparison for various distributions.

A big surprise was the regional results. Italy is the clear leader in searches for Ubuntu.

Just some observations from JAX 2008, the great conference for enterprise Java developers on their choice of operating systems...

About 40% of presenters of talks I attended used Apple notebooks. I haven't noticed that anyone used Linux as choice for his operating system. There was also a very high amount of Apple users among the 2000 attendees. Around 10% used Apple systems. In contrast I have just seen a couple of people running Linux.

I was pretty surprised by this. I would have expected that there would be much more Java developers using Linux. Especially since there is still no Java 6 for Mac OS X is available since a few days and after I've read this posting in the blog of Vladimir Dobriakov, where he talks about his experiences with Mac OS X and his switch back to Linux.

But maybe a lot of the attendees use Linux just on their workstations and not on their laptops.

Call me crazy to try a hot update while I really required to work on my system. Would you dare to do this with SuSE Linux? Or with any Microsoft Windows version? Or with Mac OS? Well, even if you would dare, these operating systems do not allow you to do that.

As already mentioned in my first impressions about Kubuntu, I expected Kubuntu as a Debian based distribution to provide a smooth upgrade. I was so sure that this can be done that I even tried it, while having a workshop that required my laptop. I wasn't dissapointed. Even more... I was astonished how smooth the upgrade was performed actually. This is something most operating system users just can dream of: Doing an online upgrade in the background, while working on the machines in less than 2 hours just one day after the official release of the distribution.

Good: The Linux client is pretty stable. I had no problems as longs as I was in SL. Some months ago I had more problems on Windows.

Bad: Still I wasn't able to find anything interesting.

Good: While I continued working on Jaclin, my avatar painted a image and earned his first L$.

If you would like to meet me, search for a manga like looking Avatar called Yaba Susanti. With a lot of luck, I may be online

While some tips may be already known to you there are certainly some that you don't know or have simply not used actively.