A long time ago ... in a galaxy far, far away ...
(Well, some time around '95 - '97 ... in a far-flung corner of the metropolis anyway)
... I stumbled upon Slackware 1.0
Having finished my Computer Science studies still relatively recently ... and having done them on Unix ... I was none too impressed with DOS/3.x or '95
And here was a Unix I could run on my own PC!
Over the ensuing years, I really tried to like linux in its various guises, but finally gave up around 2000 (RedHat 7.2 was the last distro I played with)
It was a lovely idea, but I just couldn't really
do anything with it - No real software ... No real user-base (so no real hope of any and, furthermore, no real need for those skills)
I turned back to my MS skillset and focussed on that - It would, at least, get me a job ... and, besides, there was so much more I could actually do on it
Turn the clock forward a few years and Ubuntu suddenly starts making linux look like a viable option again - There are linux magzines and everything!
But, I just don't like it - Gnome doesn't work the way I want it to ... KDE is just another 9.x/NT4.x/2K/XP clone ... The interface is still chunky and clunky and like X was back in 1990
I muck around with AfterStep and Enlightenment for a bit
But, it still doesn't grab me - AfterStep is unfinished and has no userbase ... and Enlightenment is just too much work!
And I just can't find a distro that really does what I want it to, with the look and feel that I want - And I looked at just about everything out there ... even toying with the idea of using LFS and/or T2 to roll my own distro, with a bit of Sabayon ... a bit of Gobolinux ... a bit of Nix ... a bit of Rox ...the SMART package manager ...
And then I discovered eLive GEM
Fantastic!
It's a lovely little distro, with the underlying stability of Debian and a
great showcase for E without all the hassle of having learn how to configure
it before you can use it
It's slick, fast, lightweight ... And, for all the whizzy 3D effects of compiz-
fusion, you'll be amazed at how wowed people are by the animated wallpapers
and suchlike - Of all the E based distros, it's the one that impresses people
the most at first sight, I've found
No, it's not perfect ... but, at last, I've found a distro that I'm happy to share space with on my box, rather than simply playing with yet another *buntu-derivative liveCD
I may yet end up drifting away from it - It all depends on the availability and stability of the software in the repos ... and I
am still looking at other ways of achieving the same end, with less of the dependancy on one specific subset of Debian
But, for the time being at least, at last, I've found a distro that I
want to use, rather than imagine I might have to
put up with using
And after all this time ... all these years ... all that searching ... that says a LOT about eLive!