"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"

Yeah it's late. I've got a bad case of insomnia. Anyways, I was bored and I just went through my webstats. There's a cool section that shows the search strings that people entered into search engines and navigated to this page. Surprisingly, Underactive.net appeared on the first page of matches on Google for "blueheart theme background," "windows me theme and running xmms," "absolute e enlightenment linux," "mira sorvino background," and "ps2 disc read errors." With the exception of the last search string, all of the text came from the captions in my screenshots section, which makes me wonder if I should make a how-to on how to make the Linux desktop look "l33t." Heh.

It's apparent that there's still some interest in desktop Linux, unlike what this ZDNet troll wants. And in response to his article, Macs are damn cool, but I already have a PC and desktop Linux works perfectly fine for me. I've got my browser, mail, chat, mp3 ripper/player, CD burner, DVD player, TV app... hell, I even have Quake3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein running smoothly (thank you, developers, for using OpenGL and not DirectX; and thank you, Nvidia, for the kickass Linux drivers). And for everything else, there's VMware for whenever I need to run Windows in a window.

Now if Apple wakes up and realizes that they can make a shite-load of money and expand their user base by releasing OS X for x86 systems, count me in. I just wish Apple would realize that they don't have to worry about losing hardware revenue from people buying x86 hardware to try OS X. Mac people are extremely loyal. If OS X for x86 comes out, they're not gonna go out and buy x86 hardware -- they already have a Mac! What Apple would gain would be a larger user base from people like me who already have a PC and are looking for Windows alternatives. But that hasn't happened yet, so for now I'm sticking with my Linux desktop.

Now I'm not saying that the Linux desktop is perfect. There's still some work to be done for it to gain mainstream acceptance. I think the top priority is getting better multimedia support. Video in particular. Right now, the only player that's officially out there is Real, and that's not saying much because it's version 8 and nowhere near as robust as the Windows version. Next is Windows Media. I can play ASFs, DivX AVIs and WMVs using mplayer pretty reliably, but the installation process was a little hairy (involved copying over win32 DLLs into the /usr/lib branch). And last but not least, there's Apple QuickTime. mplayer plays old MOV files but the newer, better looking, and more common Sorensen codec-based movies don't work. I can understand MS not releasing a Linux-native media player, but I don't see what Apple has to lose by creating QuickTime for Linux.

Ah well. I just yawned. I think I'll try sleeping now...