Okay, so this is kind of pointless, but I'm happy. Linux has come such a long way. My monitor for my desktop suddenly died on me, so I had to whip out my laptop and use it for awhile. Well, I had windows on it..but formatted it recently because of a virus (who woulda' thought?!) and could only find my windows installation CD. Windows barely detected any of my hardware. No sound card. No modem. No network card. So, instead of finding all of the drivers and installing them, I decided to try out mandrake on it. This was my first experience with linux on a laptop..so I didn't know what to expect. I prefer linux anyway..so I was willing to make an attempt..but sometimes linux isn't always the easiest configuring everything, so I was a BIT worried. I can configure things manually most of the time..but really..I didn't want to. Well, mandrake surely proved my negative thoughts wrong. After installing mandrake on my dell inspiron 1100...EVERYTHING worked out of the box. It was all auto configured. My DSL internet was even configured, and on my first logon I was able to browse and do everything I needed. All of my harddrive were mounted...even my external usb one. Everything worked perfectly and hassle free!

So, my point..I love linux, and I think it has a really promising future.

-RoaCh

Very cool experience!

I had a similar experience today, had a few problems with windows being, well, windows. So pulled out a slightly outdated fedora core 2 disc, installed, and everything but my intel wireless worked out of the box on my HP Compaq nx9040 notebook. The wireless won't work natively for a while yet, drivers still being developed open source on source forge, and not knowledgeable enough in linux to start playing with ndis wrappers. But overall, very happy with linux

i also like automation, but there is a difference of knowing how things work and automating it, and being stupid and being led and spoon-fed. linux for me is freedom to learn and grow.