Well, finally, all of my repedative bagering finally payed off. Pat, from the Linux Link Tech Show (aka TLLTS) finally got around to giving Kanotix a try.

Not surprising to me, he discovered that he likes this distribution better than Ubuntu and Mepis, the two most popular "newbie friendly" Linux distributions today.

Pat mentions in his post on the TLLTS forums that he'll be discussing his findings with Kanotix on this Wednesday's broadcast of the show. I'm looking forward to it and am pleased that Kanotix has another satisfied user.

Do I know a good thing when I see one, or what?

It never ceases to amaze me at how powerful, innovative, and fun the Linux desktop environment is. Okay, it's mostly due to the talented folks of the KDE desktop environment. But, it's still thanks to Linux and the open source movement.

I'm not expecting to see anything "innovative" coming from Microsoft anymore. What ever they come out with when "Longhorn" comes out, it's only going to be re-hashed from what's already available under Linux.

Take this blogging / Wiki stuff for example. Recently I created my own Wiki site and have been posting information to it. To do this, you simply use a text editor from within your web browser. However, if you're using something like IE, you have to do your own spell checking with either a plug-in you find somewhere or use an external text editor that has spell checking capabilities (which you then have to copy and paste your text from into the wiki editor).

Now, I do my updating using KDE and Konqueror. One of the nice things about this is that Konqueror has it's own in-line spell checker that watches my typing all of the time. The spell checking is built in to the browser! It's a small thing, but it's a useful thing.... an innovative thing. Something that Microsoft wasn't cleaver enough to include themselves. But not only that, I didn't have to pay the KDE folks for this feature. People pay Microsoft for their software, and it still can't compete with what's available from the open source community.

Linux; Kanotix; KDE.... it's all what Microsoft aspires to be, but has no hopes of reaching. If you're paying for and using Microsoft, you have my sympathy.