I’ve had a combination of good and bad experiences with Linux over the past two weeks that I’ve been using it as my main operating system, and I thought I’d share those thoughts with you in the forms of pros and cons.

Pros:

• Amarok is brilliant as a music organiser/player. Much better and more responsive than iTunes, and the cover manager is just *awesome*. It can auto-get the covers from Amazon and update your files for you.
• Kate is a very good text editor.
• Konqueror doesn’t impress me much as a web browser, but as a file manager it’s very good, and “remote places” is a great idea. I have Firefox for Internet anyway so I can’t complain. It also has proper Bluetooth support, which is something that I had on Windows with the WIDCOMM stack on XP SP1, but couldn’t get on SP2. Sending/receiving files one at a time is useless.
• The KDE “wallet” (which stores all your passwords and usernames under one master password) is brilliant. It’s just the right amount of security for me.
• I ran out of space on my / partition yesterday (as it was only 11gb, it was bound to happen sooner or later), but all I had to do to fix the problem was repartition a drive, format the partitions, mount them up, copy the data, then dismount and remount them at the correct mount points. I did all this while the system carried on running and didn’t have to restart once. Try doing THAT on Windows!
• You can run many Windows applications on Linux. So far I have tried mIRC, DC++, World of Warcraft, Steam and Counter-Strike Source. I’ve been trying to get Age of Empires going as well, but I need to convert the CD Image from .mds format to .iso.
• You can restart the GUI (the X server/KDM) without having to restart the PC. That is very useful for so many reasons. Also, when you log out of KDE, it saves your session so that most of your applications start again and go back to where they were when you sign back in.

Cons:

• Some things still feel like they’re “in development” and don’t work quite as it seems they should. I mean things like when you click “Administrator Mode” in the system settings, and it increases the size of all my fonts. Although having just written this… I think I may know why this is (having never logged in as root, I have never modified the font size for the root user whereas I have for “gus”)
• My main bugbear is that there seems to be no proper Remote Desktop (RDP) server available for Linux. One of the few things I really liked about Windows was the fact that RDP would dynamically size your desktop to be the same as the monitor you were on, it passed most key combinations (like the Start button on the keyboard) through to the remote session, connected disk drives, printers and ports to the local and remote computers if you requested it to, and most of all, passed any sound played on the remote computer over the Internet connection and to your local PC. That was insanely useful for listening to music at work as I could just start iTunes/Winamp at home and listen.

I really can’t think of much else to say which is that bad. There are so many nice things about the OS. I’ve only restarted three times, and I think that will decrease as I learn more. They say you should never have to restart Linux entirely.