I first tried out Linux sometime during the winter 1998-1999. I was pretty excited, but never really tried to migrate. It was not until I moved to the US that I tried full migration. First with a nice laptop my friend Nathan Myers sold me, running Debian. This was in 1999, at which time you needed black belt in Linux to install Linux on a laptop. It was cool. But eventually I never did the real splash to the new pond.
Next attempt was at Gazoo in Sunnyvale, where I was helped on my way by the famous Blackdown hacker Steve Byrnes. I eventually corrupted my installation of X, and never recovered. Since then I've tried every 18 months or so, using Red Hat, Debian and SuSE, which got me hooked on KDE - Gnome was butt ugly these days. Then Novell sold their souls to the devil, so I switched to Kubuntu. 7.04 looked pretty cool, and I was pumped for 7.10. But Kubuntu has been a big downer for me this last week. Sound didn't work. Hibernation/suspend didn't work. Compiz didn't work. Couldn't find the automatic installer for Sun's Java 6. Dual monitor didn't work. Then I went to the informal Ubuntu user group meet at Gråmunken two days ago, and got to hear what I subconsiously knew, that Kubuntu is second citizen to Ubuntu.
So, I swiped my Kubuntu installation yesterday, and installed Ubuntu 7.10. And, alas, it isn't as ugly as it used to be. And things works so well. With Synaptic I "automatically" (just checking some checkboxes) installed JDK 1.6, Subversion, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Acrobat, MySQL, ant, Apache 2 and Emacs. Manually (still simple) I've installed Skype, DbVisualizer, Azureus, Tomcat 5.5 and IntelliJ 6. It all works!
Right now I'm trying to get our application up and running. So far the only problem seems to be that we've insisted on using the "META-INF" and "WEB-INF" paths in uppercase, while naming the corresponding directories "meta-inf" and "web-inf". After almost 9 years of failures I should have learned not to be too optimistic, but I just can't help myself when it comes to open source software. This is just too cool an adventure! Wish me good luck!