Introduction

Let's start from the beginning. When I first started using computer, MSDOS was the operating system of choice. Those black n white monitors, which had a curvature of a basketball, those white perfectly rectangular cabinets with those seven segment displays for showing the clock speeds, oh! n that little turbo button that was used to overclock the PC, such were the PCs of those days. Then came the era of the coloured screens and multimedia enabled PCs. New operating systems came up, n the ones I used were windows 3.1, windows 95 and windows 97. It was then that my Dad noticed my interests in computers and bought me my first PC. It was a 667 MHz P-III with 64 MB of RAM (at 100 MHz), a 15 GB hdd and an internal fax modem. It came preloaded with windows 98. An OS I used for the next 4 years, and believe it or not without a single re-install. Oh and I still have that PC n my Mum uses it now. Hardware upgrades include 256 MB of SD RAM (at 133 MHz) and a LAN card for the internet connection. And it runs XP now, and supports all the software that you could need on an everyday basis. It still runs over 12 hours a day n apart from a few bloated capacitors and a busted soundcard, it has always worked well. Three years ago I bought another PC (which is my current one), a 1.8 GHz AMD64 processor called the 2800+ which was mounted on an Asus K8S-MX (probably the worst motherboard that you could mount it on) with a mere 512 MB of DDR RAM (at 400 MHz), an NVIDIA GeForce FX5200 with 256 MB graphics memory (god bless NVIDA) and a 160 GB SATA HDD (which was then considered as a hoarder's delight), which ran windows XP for nearly 3 years, with a zillion re-installs. During this time I learnt some really nifty tricks to tweak the OS, and even on how to maintain it. During the last one year, I used XP without any anti-virus (that would explain the zillion re-installs) and mastered the art of removing viruses manually. I would sometimes intentionally plug in a pendrive containing a virus with auto-run on, just to see how bad the malware could mess up my system. Luckily, none were of the likes of pasma n other data/application corrupting ones, like they used to make back in the days when viruses petrified me. As Microsoft announced the death of XP, I got my hands on a complimentary copy of Vista and installed it on my system. Since my PC didn't belong to the vista era, it did struggle a bit sometimes, but most of the times, it ran well, even with the Aero effect n all. As it turned out, Vista was pretty similar to XP and tweaking it wasn't that tough. In less then a week I was bored with Vista, and decided to break free from the shackles of Microsoft. It was then that I decided it was time to switch to Linux, but was faced by the dilemma of which flavour and distribution of Linux should I go in for. I asked a few friends of mine who were using linux, and they all unanimously pointed me in the direction of Ubuntu. Then came the more important question, how many other distros had they used. Turned out only a few of them had ventured beyond Ubuntu and those who had, had only checked out a couple more popular distributions. Man! This was a vicious circle, and I was caught in exactly what I was running away from, popularity overpowering capability (like microsoft over ubuntu). But anyway, I did install Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy gibon), and was really impressed by the progress it had made since I had first installed the 5.10 version of it. With millions of linux distribution circulating around the net, I have decided to try out and compare a few of them. This is my search for the ultimate linux. Considering how fast things move in the linux world (unlike in the stagnating world of windows), I am pretty certain this search wouldn't be one that I could ever conclude.