It almost seems anti-climactic to release the Geek in Review, since I've been talking about it for several days, but it's up Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: Rockin' the Linuxburbs:
Eventually, I hosed the installation with careless use of conflicting software installs and other silly uses of sudo that shouldn't have been available to a noob like myself, and I found myself using an HD install of Knoppix, which lead to a pure Debian install (from the tiny network install CD, which is really cool) before landing in my current distribution of choice, Ubuntu (which is an ancient African word that means "can't install Debian.")I looked at just a few players, because I wanted to give a broad overview, rather than an in-depth look at each one (that would have made the column way too long) and I came to the unsurprising conclusion that Amarok absolutely blows everything -- including iTunes -- away.
While Linux is still not entirely ready for people like my parents, it's really matured over the years, and in many cases it "just works" (unless you get reckless with sudo, like I did yesterday) without a lot of hassles and tweaking of configuration files and compiling from source (not that there's anything wrong with that.)
In fact, Linux has grown up so much and so well, today I can devote an entire column to some of the cooler media players available to Linux users, rather than the once-obligatory HOW TO on getting your printer to work, or mounting and unmounting a CD-ROM device with just five lines of shell script.
I'm really interested in feedback on this; if it's entertaining and informative, I'll do more Linux columns . . . to be honest, I'm not sure if it's that good an idea; there are a lot of really well-written articles out there already, and I don't exactly what I could say that hasn't been said before.
