It's the beginning of a new year, or not by the calendar, but I've always considered September to be the beginning of a new year. Basically because that's when the new school year started. And after spending 20 years in school, it basically defined a pretty constant yearly cycle. And this year, I'm starting the year of the Linux desktop.

Every year it seems that some advancement is made in Linux, and people all around the internet that this is the year of the Linux Desktop. And they are always wrong. Well, I've decided to make my own year of the Linux Desktop, and use Linux exclusively on my laptop for an entire year.

I've been dabbling in Linux for about 13 years, but never really went full time with it. I've always at least dual booted, and mostly running Windows, and the last few years I've only run it in a virtual machine, because for the most part that was fast enough for my purposes.

In order to give it a full chance, I've decided to go a full year without any other OS on my main computer, which happens to be a laptop. My desktop mostly sits unused taping TV shows on a TV Tuner, and acting as a file storage server for stuff that I don't have space for on my laptop, or that I want backed up.

So this is my experiment. See if I can use Linux exclusively on this computer for the next full year. I'll try to blog a bit about my experiences, probably what most annoys me, but probably about other things I find pleasant too.

For those who are into Linux, I've decided that I'm going to run Debian. I've played with Ubuntu a bit, which is "The Linux for Desktops", but I can't say I've ever liked it that much. Years ago I would have gone with Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) but that seems to have fallen into disuse. And, since I've been running Debian on a virtual machine the last few years, I think that it is a pretty good distribution, and that it's stable and good enough that I could use it for a full year.