The Hardware Tells the Story

     I took 3 factors into consideration when deciding which operating systems I was going to be married to for the next couple months.  1)  Dependability.  2) Hardware Compatibility. 3) Familiarity.  I wanted an OS that I didn't want to have to rebuild every day, or tinker with to make it usable.  I also needed something that would work with my current machine.  I'm testing these OS's on an AMD Phenom II 790 FX platform with a new Nvidia Graphics card.  I also wanted to use a desktop environment that I was already familiar with and enjoyed looking at.
    When tossing around possible choices for the most dependable OS, I had to consider a BSD, or UNIX OS, with a nice desktop environment.  There are several variants of the BSD's these days.  The most widely used are the server implementations, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.  These are command line OS's and very minimal graphical interface.  GUI's just aren't needed when administering a server.  Yes, you can install FreeBSD and add any desktop environment you want, but this is incredibly tedious with an extremely high learning curve. In short, it could take you weeks or months to have a fully functional modern desktop operating system.   There are several desktop BSD projects as well:  PC-BSD, KFreeBSD, TrueBSD, Evoke, RelaxBSD and a couple more.  I chose PC-BSD because it is the most polished, end-user friendly of all the choices, and because I've used it before.
    When it came to a Linux distribution, the possibilities are almost endless:  Ubuntu, Arch, Mandriva ,PC LinuxOS, Slackware,  Freespire, Puppy, DSL Linux, Mint, Fedora, Sabayon, and so on, and so on.. etc etc..  some I have used, most I have not.  There's just too damn many for one person to really get a good feel for every Linux OS.  The ones that stuck out most in my mind as candidates were Ubuntu, PC LinuxOS, Sabayon, Mint and Fedora.  I excluded the rest because I wanted something I could have up and running in less than an hour.  I also wanted to stay away from the command line as much as possible.  I could go into a 3 page dissertation on why I chose what I did, but that would take way too much effort.  I chose Kubuntu because it's pretty, dependable, and liked my hardware.  Ta dah!
     I will tell you that what I've discovered when researching literally 200+ distributions is that Linux and BSD desktop hardware support has come a long way in the last few years.  I mentioned in the first post that one of the reasons i always returned to Windows was hardware issues.  This is pretty much a thing of the past.  My video, sound, sata, printer, webcam, various mp3 players in the household, cameras, and phones are all supported in Linux with no problems. You may still find oddball hardware (like my Magic Jack, grr) that do not work in Linux, but believe me when I tell you, someone is working on it.
     Next post I'll go over the installation of PC-BSD followed by the installation of Kubuntu.