Well, I got a proud moment to announce! I’ve used linux off and on throughout the years, but never seriously. I’ve never compiled anything on any distro of linux in my life. However, I’ve gotten rather serious with opensuse over the last couple of weeks. Whoever says linux is usable only by experts really hasn’t tried. I just successfully, 100% compiled and configured the 2.6.30 kernel, modules, and everything from complete scratch, with no previous knowledge on any kinda programming anything. And to make it even better, it booted right up with absolutely no errors! Sorry if this seems like gloating, but I am proud and wanted to share! There’s nothing hard about this stuff. I was proud enough I finally got the nerve to completely nuke my windows partition and add the space to my /home dir. I’m pure opensuse 11.1 now. 
Good for you… enjoy the freedom
btw, compiling kernels isn’t that difficult. It’s not actually rocket science
Oh I know it isn’t NOW. It’s the appearance of such a task when you’ve never done it that makes you wanna wimper.:’( However, I wanted to learn badly enough that I made it happen in my own lil way. Anyway, glad to become a permanent resident. 
Compiling programs is not hard. Writing and getting programs to work is much more fun. 
Congrats on the switch.
Its better on this side of the grass isnt it? I recently switched too.
First day of using linux - set up vmware / hypervisor, Samba, NXServer, SFTP on an IBM x2400 Server. Im still learning but yeah its really not as uber-haxor as I guess it used to be.
microchip8 wrote:
>
> Good for you… enjoy the freedom
>
> btw, compiling kernels isn’t that difficult. It’s not actually rocket
> science
>
>
Neither is rocket science.
–
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman not newsboy
“I wear the cheese. It does not wear me.”
rocket science is not difficult? That’s very debatable, especially when it comes to space rockets… anyways, you know what one means when he says “not as difficult as rocket science”… it’s a common used expression to indicate the task from a distance may seem difficult but when you get at it, it’s actually not… Personally, I find openSUSE kernels to be the most easiest to compile. I’ve tried doing the same on Fedora some years ago and it was actually quite a mess. Note that this was a few years ago and things might have changed for the better in Fedora 
The only really hard thing about Linux sometimes is having too much choice and trying to settle on a distro! For me, though, since 10.1, OpenSuse has been my favourite.
Cheers.
For me linux is easier then windows from what I have seen, when people think linux is hard they have no idea what they are talking about.
Agree here:
“when people think linux is hard they have no idea what they are talking about.”
Agreed! People these days are too lazy to trouble shoot problems and really explore/make mistakes.
Tells alot about an individuals character
The Hard Part is the change. That’s what people don’t like. Because for the most part they will have come from ‘Spoon Fed Comfort Food’.
Now they actually have the chance to get out there and ‘Grow Their Own’, but it can be hard work.