I recently purchased a brand spanking new Lenovo T61p notebook (well, spanking new for a month until they released their new line based on the Montevina chipset), and I’ve had to opportunity to try out various operating systems lately in addition to the included Windows Vista Business 64-bit edition. The ones I have tried have been Linux Mint, Ubuntu Linux 64-bit, and Mac OS X Leopard. After having tried them, I think I’m ready to offer my own personal opinion on things.

The Windows Vista epiphany.

Windows Vista has been infamous since its debut. There have been much complaint, mainly relating to driver incompatibilities, memory usage, and the annoying security features. Personally, about the nicest thing I can say about Vista is that, there are things they can certainly work on. I personally haven’t experienced any driver incompatibilities, mainly due to the new hardware that I have been using with it. Memory usage has been concerning for me however.

The modern Linux distribution.

To me Linux has always been a ‘geeks’ system. Someone that is quite literate in computers and can comfortably accomplish the same tasks using either a command line interface or a GUI, and would at the same time have fun doing so. Someone who doesn’t freak out when something goes wrong or doesn’t work correctly, and actually wants to have the fun of fixing the problem themselves. The adventurer, the explorer… And I think this has been typically the personality that has been associated with the average *NIX user over the pass couple of decades.

Now however, the tables have changed.