Gnome 2.8.2

If there is a silver lining to having to rebuild a machine in the middle of an already tight project schedule (?) its that I have all new everything on my ad0 partition; freshly compiled applications, everything zips along, and I didn’t bother compiling any but Gnome—these last releases really feel quite solid, and , well, it delivers some bang for the memory and resources it uses. Even that’s not a fair comment – Gnome now feels very zippy on this 2.4GHz 1GB RAM machine, and the network integration is a plus that I just don’t get with fluxbox and the like.

I still run Windows for specific market analysis applications that I just can’t get on *nix, and I must say over the last year X and *nix have moved from being “just a little more work” to being “just a little bit easier” to deal with than Windows. Perhaps its my own knowledge level rising, but I think the underlying applications and OS deserve most of the credit. It does feel like the Open Source world is closer to making a breakthrough with ordinary folks than ever before.

There must be an investment angle in that, too. It may just be “short MSFT”, but that too is a valid strategy (not to be rolled out indiscriminantly!)