I've just about had it with the Windows OS. Breakdowns, slow processing and response times, my smug friends with their Macs, constant patching to improve stability, ugly interfaces, a constant need to purchase Firewalls and Antivirus software, my smug friends with their Macs (Yes, I know I said that before). AAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!! While some of my favourite IDE's and software run on WIndows and all my development life has been on WIndows, I really do not want to put up with this "wahala" anymore. I'm however not quite ready to cough up for a 17" Mac Book Pro, besides one more laptop in my house...erm, no. Besides I'm hoping that I can find an OS that would make me as smug as my SMU (smug mac users) friends. Thankfully Linux has become a more appealing OS with the release of distros like Ubuntu. My choice, LinuxMint is a very well put together OS based on Ubuntu but, a hell of a lot prettier. It really is very pretty. It can be run from a CDRom but, is better served running on the harddrive. I installed LinuxMint Daryna as a dual boot with Windows XP, no real headaches there. All seems relatively well so far. Yes one is seriously suffering from Newbieitis - installing the simplest thing is a 30 minute trawl through reams of googled pages but I hope that this OS can offer me 'Peace of mind', something that only came in short bursts from Windows. LinuxMint is blindingly fast, pretty to look at, has the force of the Linux Open Source community behind it and it costs zero. How cool is that!
Now all I have to do is to figure out how to install 'Moviestar', FlashDevelop,Flex SDK, FlexBuilder 3 and Flash Media Server amongst others, sigh :(