Ok, we can call it official. I have officially “broken up” with Desktop Linux.

I took (at least) a 2 month break from running any flavor of Linux on my primary home desktop, and recently I tried stepping back into the world of Desktop Linux, and I have discovered, that it just isn’t right for me any longer. I ran some distribution of Linux as my primary home desktop OS for over 3 years, and dual-booted for a good 6 years before that. After using nothing but Windows for 2 months, I was really able to notice all of the little things I was “working around” and/or “living with” when using Linux on the desktop.

At first, I chalked up my issues to running the Alpha build of Ubuntu 9.04, but after reverting back to 8.10, my suspicions were confirmed. I simply do not want to “work around” my OS - I want my OS to work around me…does that make sense?

All of that being said, there are three areas where Linux is a viable alternative to Windows: Server applications, Developer/Development Workstations and “Simple” Desktops. By “simple” Desktops I mean things such as Netbooks, and what I like to call a “Grandma OS”, which means it’s perfect for someone who needs basic web-browsing, e-mail and productivity functionality.

At this point, at least for me, the days of Linux being a “power users” OS are simply gone, unless you are a developer, like mentioned above. 

What is causing this? I honestly feel like the quality of many of the distro’s are taking a step backwards from where they were just two years ago. After all the years of each new release getting better and better, things have really bottomed out. What where the “pinnacles” for me? With Ubuntu, I feel like it peaked with 6.06 (splendid release), and had another minor peak with 7.04 (another splendid release - for me, anyway). In the land of Red Hat, Fedora 6 was awesome, which in turn means RHEL 5.x and CentOS 5.x are awesome, but horribly stale by now.

It seems all of the mainstream “community” distros are more focused on hitting that 6-mo. release cycle that bugs simply aren’t getting fixed, and that’s a shame. I think more distro’s should take the Debian route, and release when ready, and then backport many of the desktop apps such as the Web-Browser and Office Suite when new, and improved versions come along.

I do still have three physical machines in my home running Linux, and they will keep it. One is a Sun SPARC workstation running a CLi only install of Debian 5.0 (with a LAMP stack installed), I have an older AMD AthlonXP 2400+ machine that’s running Ubuntu 8.04 (it’ll only get upgraded to the next LTS release), and I have a 1GHz AMD Laptop running Xubuntu 8.10. I also have countless Linux virtuals of many distributions that are living on my primary workstation in the form of Virtual Machines, so that I can keep up with the progress things are making, and also stay involved in the GNOME project.

As for my primary machine’s host OS? Windows XP Professional x64 edition. Simply put, it’s the best desktop OS available right now, and I couldn’t be happier with it.