Well, it’s over.

I’ve ended the Linux experiment this morning, a couple of days earlier than I had initially hoped. After several days of trying, I was never able to get the laptop to attach to my wireless network at home.

Dealbreaker.

It’s odd, too, because it attaches to the network here at work just fine, which is WPA Personal just like the network at home. I tried every combination of encryption listed in the wpa_supplicant documentation (which, I’ll admit, has lied to me in the very recent past), but nothing ever worked. So, I quit.

What I’ll take away from this is confidence in my decision from a few years back to leave Desktop Linux as my day-to-day operating system and move to Mac OS X. It certainly was the right decision then, and it remains the right decision now. As long as Apple can hold off getting me totally pissed, my next machine will hopefully be a MacBook Pro, perhaps even based on the new Merom processors from Intel, which sound absolutely incredible, if I can hold off that long. I’ve tentatively scheduled late April through early May as the time I want this to happen. It appears that Merom will be further off than that.

Not that this was a total bust. I suppose this experiment could be labled as a “successful failure.” Having no clear goals with this, the idea was to see how far I could take desktop Linux, given my current needs for a machine that just stays out of the way and lets me get stuff done. The result: Linux, today, for me, is not going to cut it.

I did find an environment that was attractive enough in KDE. While not matching the excellent look of the Mac OS, it was acceptable, particularly when I remembered/configured the KDE docks to accept DockApps from WindowMaker.

I never did bother to get postfix and fetchmail and procmail filtering on that machine, but I’ve no doubt that it could be done. Instead, I played with kontact, the KDE Outlook-ish do-it-all PIM. I was very pleasantly surprised with its far reach of capabilities and overall happy with its performance. So much so, in fact, that I’ve given fink a few days to do a fink install kontact, so I can mess with it further as an X11 app on the Mac. No, probably not going to replace mutt, at least not now, but perhaps, maybe, someday.

I was also not happy with the web browsing experience in KDE. Firefox on Linux is too butt-ugly for me to use for any length of time (at least by default; maybe I could spend a few hours Googling and vim-ming my prefs.js file, but not this time). And Konqueror, while a very spiffy kitchen-sink type of browser, just held too many incompatibilities for me, particularly with this new theme for my site, and Gmail, which always wanted to run in a limited mode because the browser was ‘not supported.’ When I forced Konq to appear to be Firefox to Gmail, the full interface was there, but weird things just wouldn’t work right.

Linux still very definitely has a place for me, but it’s not on the desktop, as a day-to-day OS. I’ll be continuing to look at “LiveCD” distros for my security, forensics, and troubleshooting work, and I’ll keep Linux around as a server OS in the computer room, because it’s just great at that. Not that I couldn’t use Mac OS X Server as a replacement, in fact, I’ve got four Xserves doing various things in that room. But Linux still chugs along on otherwise discardable hardware, doing nice little jobs that it’s very, very well suited for. And I do have a couple boxes in there that are definitely NOT discardable, doing important tasks for the Lab as a whole, and Linux is a perfect match.

Just not for my desktop/laptop. Mac OS X gives me the familiarity of Unix, the nicest interface available, and services that just work, without tweaking. I think I’ll stick with what works.