Open Source software is something which we wholeheartedly embrace. The reasons we favour using Open Source is not just because you don’t have to pay for it (our rule of thumb is that to keep the community going it is the honourable thing to do, and as such making a small donation such as the value of a CD for a product you use every day in your work is not too much to ask), but because often open source software does exactly the task or job we want it to, is well documented, and excellent quality and by using it you “free” and are not confined to use other proprietary software and locked into the walled garden of software from a particular company. You are also “free” to modify the code and tailor open source software to your particular needs.
It is some years ago that i migrated first to Ubuntu Linux, before that I had been using Red Hat and even versions like Caldera before that. Ubuntu was dubbed Linux for Humans and it did live up to its moniker. I really liked how easy it was to install, and there was less fiddling around with configuration settings etc., it pretty much installed from CD with a few choices to make. I was amazed at how you could relatively seamlessly move from a windows home office set up to ubuntu, for pretty much every piece of software I needed there was a Linux version, or a similar product. The only issue i had to ubuntu was my printer driver didnt work.
I tried a number of different dialects of Debain, Mint, Peppermint, Linux, Mandrake, SuSe, FT-Linux, Caldera, Red Hat, Feedora and Gentoo.
The Debian based distributions I like Ubuntu, Mint and Peppermint. Debian itself, but i was really impressed with Mint (and peppermint) as being a linux for humans, easy to install and use.
Mint i found very user friendly, and very very little technological knowledge is needed to install it and get it up and running. Mint very kindly recognised my scanner printer first go.
