Okay... Let's introduce myself.

I'm a 28 year old guy from The Netherlands with a fascination for Linux and other open source projects (Mozilla, FreeBSD, Samba, MPlayer, OpenOffice, the GNU project (the gcc compiler suite among others), MAME - the arcade emulator, SidPlay, VICE, etc, you name it ...).

Open source as a (development) model really works, despite what some people are saying.

I remember MAME when it was still at version 0.1 (1997 or something) it grew - as a project, quality-wise and it's size <hehe> - enormously.

I remember Mozilla when it was M10 or something. It was barely useful and now we have a full featured (some say bloatware) browser. Well, look what happens, *boing*, Mozilla Firebird gets born with new ambitions (faster, smaller), new forks of Mozilla appear, etc ..

Here we have gcc, a cross platform compiler suite in active development. Wow.

Samba is used professionally nowadays. Even HP, Sun and IBM heavily sponsor the project because it's so important for them.

OpenOffice is getting better and better.

OK... I've made my point, I guess.. :-)

By profession I'm a system adminstrator in a HP-UX, Red Hat Linux, Windows NT4/2000 network (soon also a little bit Sun Solaris on SPARC).

Professionaly, in the company where I work, we are really keen to use Linux _wherever possible_. Also, a lot of my colleages enjoy trying out Linux distro's, some are even using it (privately) where they can (for example sharing an internet connection) or troubleshooting with Knoppix (amazing project, can't emphasize that enough).

My 'passion' for Linux has grown, I think, out of my history with the Commodore 64 and Amiga. When these platforms faded away, I went to OS/2, which I found a very nice platform those days.

Finally real multitasking for mortals. I was such a fan of OS/2 that I bought OS/2 Warp Connect in the shop. But the one thing that bothered me the most with OS/2 was the enormous dependency a OS/2 user had with IBM. I once wrote IBM a giant wishlist with features, suggestions and hints for the next version of OS/2. Never got a reply from them.

We all know what happened in those years with OS/2 and the rise of the Microsoft machine. OS/2 lost against marketing, while it had a technical edge (at the time) over it's opponent.

After some years with Windows I came into contact with Red Hat 5.2 and - oh irony - Caldera Linux (yeah, the SCO/Caldera boys) who were really into Linux those days).

Using Linux tough me Unix. And networking. And some more stuff.

What I like most in the Linux community is the enormous scale of it all. Here, you have Red Hat Linux, which is my personal preffered distribution at the moment and Red Hat Linux Enterprise which is getting nice and a potential target for companies.

There's also SuSE which is also nice, Knoppix - always amazing to give to new users and nice to hear when they are enthousiastic, Slackware for older machines or if you prefer Slack.

GNU/Debian will always be there for being a safe haven against greedy companies, etc, etc ....

With the bugzilla systems getting more popular the end-user can have really good communication with the developers, which I think is important.

Every year we see the capabilities of the Linux distributions and the packages they're carrying, getting better and better.

OK .. I can go on and on.

The internet helped me with technical problems in the past and now I hope to help others.

Have fun.

(in my official voice... )

well you certainly seem to know your stuff, welcome aboard. You sound like you've got a good knownledge of many different distros, why not review some off them in our reviews section... informed reviews are always desirable.