One reason I use Linux.
It continually surprises and impresses me, in a good way. As a little background: I’ve used Linux at a moderate to advanced level for a few years now: I’ve never written a bash script longer than 6 lines and never hacked the kernel, but I’m not afraid of the command line and have no problems editing my xorg.conf, grub.conf or any other system files using nano. The command line is my friend, but I still like a GUI admin panel sometimes. I’ve totally switched to Linux as evidenced by the fact that the last copy of Microsoft office I purchased or used on my own computers was 2000.
Anyway, I recently bought a new laptop and I set it up as a dual-boot system with Vista and Ubuntu (I originally had a triple boot system with Open Suse until I remembered how clunky RPM based Distros are and I have a whole post full of “observations” about Vista, but this is all neither here nor there.) I was testing the battery life, ran it down, plugged it back into the power cord, and, for some unknown reason, I right clicked the battery life indicator. It had an interesting option called “power history,” so I clicked it. Turns out that it prints out these nice graphs that show everything from the voltage to the wattage to the accuracy of the batteries prediction ability. Needless to say, it impressed me. I’ve used Ubuntu for a long time now on a laptop and never noticed that little feature.
So while Linux may take a little more effort to set it up, it and the people behind Linux reciprocate by giving you the little extras that make the experience go from droll to impressive. The only thing impressive Vista has given me so far is two blue screens of death since Wednesday.
A few screenshots (each of which only took one button press and one mouse click to make).
