I have been a Linux user for close to 20 years by now and I have been a Debian user for more than half of that time. Most of the time I have had Windows machines in parallel, so I have had a rather close comparison with the main competition. My main tool for work has always been the Linux system, when I have had a choice.
I use my machines for a huge number of tasks. Email and web like everyone else. Word processing, spreadsheets and presentations in my tasks as corporate management and technical manager. Python, Emacs and other developers tools for program development. MUD, computer games, music and film for entertainment. Irc, Skype and XMPP for communication. I run mailing lists, servers for booking canoes and selling wine and a server for statistics in a car cooperative. I store and edit my photos. Sometimes I write scripts to do image processing and sometimes I write scripts that spider websites for information. I also do bookkeeping for he kayak club that I am a member of.
Most of this can be done very well on a Linux machine and more often than not, it will work better to do it there than under Windows. Still, there are things that are broken or break unexpectedly on my Linux machines. I use Debian testing since many years back. I'm happy to accept short periods of brokenness in exchange for having access to recent packages. On the whole this has worked extremely well and the problems I want to write about on this blog would not go away if I was using the stable release.
My intention with this blog is to illuminate the problems I run into in my use and administration of my Debian systems. The purpose is to give Debian and upstream developers an insight into the nature of the problems that users have. Hopefully this will improve the user experience in the long run. Maybe the year of Linux on the desktop will happen one day. Currently there are too many hurdles to large scale adoption. While many things have gotten better in recent years, there are still some shortcomings in areas of paramount importance.
To make you aqainted with my environment, here is a brief introduction of the machines I am using:
sangiovese - an AMD64 installation of Debian testing in an HP machine. This is my main workhorse. It has an extra graphics card, a large monitor, analog speakers on a separate audio card and a webcam with built in microphone on a USB plug. The machine has 4 GB of RAM and is on my home network through 100 Mbit/s wired ethernet.
muscat - an i386 installation running Debian testing. It is an old HP/Compaq machine that works as printserver and music server for my squeezebox system. It has a wired connection to my home network.
protagonist - a Thinkpad x60s laptop with 4 GB of RAM running Debian testing. I use it for everything while travelling and for reading stuff and watching video in bed.
enzo - this is my office workstation. It runs Debian testing, AMD64. Its main use is for mail, web browsing and administrative tasks.
theraft - this is the office main server. I am not administrating this machine, but I occasionally need to do stuff on it. It runs Debian stable.
pbf - this is the server for my hobby projects. It runs Debian testing AMD64 and is a virtual host. It used to be a physical machine but was turned into a virtual host after the hardware started acting up.
There are other machines that show up in my life, but they usually have more specialized tasks, and there are other people who manage them.
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