I've recently decided that it is rather shortsighted and stupid of me to limit myself to only one development platform.  I have never said anything bad about any other platforms (mainly because I have no experience with them and so anything I would say has no basis of fact), and have long been content on Windows.

Lately I have given it more thought and realized that, although still not having any sort of decent marketshare (in the home user market, rather), Unix/Linux are certainly growing in popularity and ease of use and may see themselves take a portion of the market.  I'm not trying to make any predictions about when or if they will grow to be such a common powerhouse that purchasing computers from Dell, HP, or the other big players in the PC market preload a Linux distribution instead of Windows.

So, in my quest to start learning that side of the computer world, I have been faced with a rather large choice.  Which of the hundreds of varieties do I choose?  I have searched around and the first thing that becomes apparent is that there is no clear-cut choice for Unix/Linux, and that everybody is a self-proclaimed expert and touts the benefits of the system they use.  I have yet to find a completely objective and unbiased comparison.  I was able to put together what I believe were the "top" distributions and am now trying to figure out which to use: Debian, Mandrake (Mandriva), SuSe (or OpenSuSe), Fedora; and of the Unix portion, FreeBSD.

On that note, in my own opinion one of the reasons Linux hasn't grabbed a larger portion of the market yet is simply because of the wide variety and lack of cohesiveness as a group.  If they would just settle on one single system to compete with Microsoft, they might actually have a chance.  Its all the individuals or small groups who want their own flavor that is damaging the process.  Additionally, though I haven't personally experienced it *yet* (I'm sure I will), many new users to the Linux/Unix world find themselves outcasts and the subject of much ridicule.  Essentially, when they ask a question their intelligence and ability is insulted because they are "too stupid" to figure the system out.  Frankly, I'm sorry new users don't have 20 years of experience behind them to help them understand a convoluted and non-intuitive system; but that's ok, insult away and maybe they'll suddenly be bestowed with knowledge and won't need your help.  Seriously guys, if you want to further the cause, you need to actually help instead of be a bunch of pious jerks.

With that aside, I decided the best way to "quickly" evaluate the different flavors I have narrowed my selection down to is to merely install them as VirtualPC images.  I began by installing Debian (or rather, beginning to install) last night.  I left it running the "internet" install and am curious to see how it turned out.  I have to leave pretty early to get to work before traffic starts, however, so I wasn't able to take a look this morning before I left.  We'll see later.  I didn't get far enough to say if it was easy or not to configure because everything up to this point has been a bunch of prompts.

I'll keep updates on my quest to learn Linux/Unix (I slash them because I haven't decided which to pursue yet) and start learning a whole new development platform -- probably both PHP and Java; I know both are available on Windows, but I want to use them on their originally intended platform.