A few days ago the Linux distro I had been most anticipating, SimplyMEPIS 3.3, was released. I downloaded the ISO, checked the md5sum, and immediately burned the CD. The LiveCD bootup went well, with a few minor error messages here and there. But I was not discouraged. Once the LiveCD finished booting I tried to activate my wireless. This caused the Mepis System Center to freeze. I tried again and got the same result. Hoping that once it was installed it would work, I formatted my Linux partitions and let it go. This time things went worse-- on startup it was getting page faults when loading the IPW2100 driver. This never happened in SimplyMEPIS 2004.06.
This is when I decided that I would rather have a stable Linux installation than a "bleeding edge" one with the latest packages. SimplyMEPIS 2004.06 (contrary to what the name suggests, came out in mid-December) installed like a dream and everything worked "out of the box," so to speak. I did an "apt-get update" followed by an "apt-get upgrade" and all was still good. Tuxrucer using 3D acceleration worked without installing additional drivers. GLQuake worked as well.
Since I am running MEPIS on a Centrino laptop I needed to enable CPU speedstepping (i.e. slowing the CPU down when the speed isn't necessary) to save some battery life. After a quick search on the mepislovers.org forums I was ready to go, effectively doubling my expected battery life in Linux. Unfortunately the battery still does not last as long as it does in Windows. Currently I'm getting between 3-3.5 hours in Windows XP Pro and 2 hours in Linux while doing everyday operations such as instant messaging, web browsing, word processing, etc, with my wireless networking enabled.
Using KDE System Guard I've been keeping an eye on the memory usage of Linux and have been comparing it to the numbers in XP's task manager. XP's task manager usually reports about 250 mb of swap being used while just having instant messaging and a web browser (Gaim and Mozilla Firefox) running. Linux reports no swap being used and only about 256 mb of physical memory occupied with the same applications. Wow! And I was worried that my 256 mb swap partition would be too small. Linux seems a bit quicker for this "everyday use" as well.
In the past few days (this being day 3) I have been spending the bulk of my computing time within Linux and I am loving it.
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