Hmmmm...

Bounte sent me back my HP laptop today, my road dog that I use for live performance, and I thought, since I had the afternoon free, I would try out the pure:dyne Linux distro, largely based upon Peter Kirn’s repeated schilling, but also because I’m something of a masochist, apparently.

The main thing I learned is that there’s something to be said for spending a bit of money. While it’s fun to get all this jank for free and all, quite frankly, there isn’t enough time in the day. I probably spent two hours trying to figure out how to make it so the mouse pointer didn’t go across the entire screen when I moved my finger, say, a centimeter. (For what it’s worth, I wasn’t actually able to figure this out. I just gave up.) Then another hour spent trying to figure out where the example patches for PD are stored. I was finally able to get sound to come out of the computer, but by that time, I simply didn’t care any more.

No offense to the FLOSS banner-wavers, but Jesus Christ, by the end of the process, I was willing to press “accept” on any damned EULA you put in front of me just to have a help file that said something besides “todo: write help file.” Now, all that said, this is a fairly comprehensive package, and it’s non-invasive. You just download the ISO, drag one of the folders to your hard drive, boot from the CD, and you’re golden. No partitioning nightmares or configuration hell. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s true. After 15 years, Linux is almost to the point where you can, like, do something. But not really.