So I've been playing around with Ubuntu linux a little.  I have it installed in a VM on my windows box.  Yes, I know that's heresy, but it lets me try things out without any real commitment. :-)

At any rate, the Ubuntu install went well, and I've had great fun loading up on free apt-get softward, including a whole slew of really cool programming tools and stuff.  Someday I'll actually get a chance to use Ubuntu for real.  It seems like a very "Mac-ish" or "Windows-ish" distro, and it makes me feel immediately at home.

However

I just the other day downloaded the boot image for "Damn Small Linux" (DSL), which is a complete desktop linux distro that fits in a 50mb iso.  That's right - 50mb.  It's very focused on being small and light, and the whole thing will run quite comfortably (xwindow and all) in about, well, let's see - 28.5 megs for the running system and the copy of Firefox that I'm writing this entry on. :-)

The thing I like about DSL is the strictly bare-bones approach.  The UI is very uncluttered and sleek, yet it has all the stuff you want.  And the UI runs FAST, even in the virtual PC window.  Windows or Mac users who have never tried to use X before will be a little confused at first, but it's very slick.  I'm not sure how well it would stand up to daily use, but dang it's cool.  And it's loaded with a full set of networking and disk management tools, so it would make an excellent "rescue" operating system.  Yet another cool feature is that the system's status is visible at all times on the desktop, including cpu usage, up time, ram and disk allocation, etc.  This is a hacker's system to be sure.

After using DSL, I'm tempted to do a Debian install and configure it to use the same window manager, etc.  I think I'd miss the more advanced features of a full distro after a while.  But then again, DSL is a more capable system than Windows was just a few years ago.

Oh well, back to XP to get some work done. :-/