OS Nirvana

Anyone who knows me knows I change operating systems weekly... from Solaris to Vista, FreeBSD to Ubuntu.. you name it, I've tried it.. and I usually get a bit bored after a while. The reasons are many and varied, but I usually tire of the interface, or some little annoyance gets to me and I feel like a change.. But now, after all these years I really have found something I finally feel comfortable with, and where there isn't even one annoyance.. in otherwords, I have found my computing nirvana. Ladies, and gentlemen... allow me to introduce... E-Live

What is it? It's a Linux distribution based on Debian, as many are (Ubuntu etc). E-live uses Enlightenment as its default desktop environment, so it is unbelievably snappy whilst looking far nicer than other, heavier environments and window managers. I guess it comes down to pure coding skills, but in Enlightenment and the libraries that it uses, the creators have brought forth a wonder.. It is beautiful, but fast, and seems light years ahead of traditional Linux environments.

As the name suggests, E-Live is actually a live CD, so you can boot off the disc and use it straight away. You'll get most benefit in actually installing it though, so it runs off your disk at full speed. Its fairly good looking by default, but careful application of some downloaded wallpapers, themes and login manager screens has transformed even this beauty into something amazing to behold..

Whilst E-Live is beautiful, fast and thus far extremely stable (even on the 'unstable' version), where I have consistently been impressed is in software installation. Whether I use 'apt-get' to install programs from the default repositories, or download a self-extracting Google Earth, everything seems to just work, and installs itself nicely..even inserting entries into the Enlightenment menus..

The default graphical file manager used by E-Live is 'Thunar', and what a breath of fresh air! I'm sick to death of Nautilus and the new KDE file manager 'Dolphin' I couldn't stand.. Like the rest of E-Live, Thunar is fast, clean and simple. In other words - it 'just works'. Perfect.

A few painless installs of such yummy things as SongBird, Google Earth, VirtualBox etc.. and my computing Nirvana is complete.. If I do need to, Vista pops up in a few seconds courtesy of VirtualBox, but other than that its all plain sailing...

I can't recommend E-Live enough. Bear in mind you may need to tinker a teeny bit to make it just perfect.. but for me, it was worth it.. Computing is fun again, and I have ZERO desire to change my OS for the forseeable future...

Suck it and see anyway - download the live cd at http://www.elivecd.org