Linux won’t become my favourite operating system anytime soon, that’s sure. I may not be geek enough, but it’s no fun when i install an operating system and i have to spend hours worth of time configuring and installing such basic stuff such as mp3 codecs for the built-in media player (i wonder what it can play out of box), accessing other partitions or just using the network.

Ubuntu is a great choice if you are lucky enough to have a network card it supports. Too bad for me, it recognises neither my wired nor the wireless card, so it’s totally useless, since i spend most of the time with network activities or coding. Without network access i couldn’t update or install any more software, so there was no point to mess around with it anymore.

Yesterday i decided to try out openSUSE. The live cd surprised me: my wired network actually worked! Since i’m not at home now, i’m connecting to the net on wired network (thus i don’t know if the wireless’d work), so i could install stuff and use it… With not much success. I couldn’t mount my NTFS partitions normally (i even tried editing the fstab manually), nor could i play mp3 files, even after installing the suggested codec for the built-in player and lame too. And it wouldn’t import any of my settings from Windows (Ubuntu did). After a day of googling for fixes of various minor annoyances, i decided that whatever people say, i’d have to spend a lot more time in front of the screen (thus going “kyub“) to get adept at using linux. Until then i’ll just stay a lame music-maniac philosopher journalist with a strange addiction to php, who uses Windows. Still.

How does it feel to post your artwork on deviantArt, your photos or thoughts on Tumblr, or just a blogpost on the sphere, when you know that no one is interested, you can write whatever you want, you could announce that you invented the cold fusion engine, and minimized it so that it fits into your pocket, no one would read you, simply because they don’t know you are there. There are so many people on these places, that you need more than one out of the following: huge luck (for some editor or a famous blogger to stumble upon your activity), extreme patience (to constantly post your works, however tiring that may be, and wait for the people to slowly realise who you are), lot of free time (to go around the sphere finding interesting people and starting to follow them or comment on their posts, hoping that they’ll come back to you to return the favour—note, this is the best way to do it, though it needs loads of devotion) or loads of friends or fans beforehand (if you’re a successful blogger or artist before joining a site where a couple of your readers is present, then you won’t have to wait a minute to receive a comment on whatever you did). Regarding the last few words of the parentheses: the most annoying thing is when you do your best and write or draw or photo really high quality stuff, any no one pays attention because some “popular person” just pooped in his hat. It’s just annoying. You can’t (shouldn’t) spend all your time before the screen just so that you’ll get a couple more visitors, and a bit of appreciation for your work.

To be honest, i’m not that huge fan of Facebook, but i’m registered ever since my american exchange partner invited me. I wasn’t using it much, so i’m not familiar with it’s deeper functioning, but i’ve read that there’s a new version available, at least the layout is new, and it’s available at new.facebook.com. I decided to check it out, but except for a couple of changes in the layout, i couldn’t see much change. There’s a new bar at the top and the bottom of the page, the bottom one being the more important, displaying how many of your friends are online, your notifications and a popup chat. The Wall got a lot bigger space on the profile page, and somehow all the applications that took up so much disappeared (may be they are not yet running on the “new Facebook”), just a couple is squeezed into the left sidebar. The home page didn’t really change, the left column disappeared and thus the page became a two-column design, which results in a somewhat better look. But the main design, the colours and basically everything else remained just the same. I’ve got the feeling that they’re either going to change a lot more in the future, or they’re afraid that their users won’t be able to get used to the new interface if it changed too much—which is a real danger, seeing the average performance of community site users. If anyone else has a different opinion, or was using Facebook more than i, feel free to write your opinions.

Finally, it’s out. I hope everyone downloaded it during the Download Day, if not, do so now. At least give it a try, especially if you’re still suffering with Internet Explorer (that thing makes both the user and the developer suffer). The Download Day was, i think, a success, since FF3 was downloaded more than eight million times in that 24 hours. To write something about the browser too: it’s about the same as before, i couldn’t see many changes, except for that the skin i used (Noia) and some of the plugins do not yet work with the new version (at least the webdev toolbar had no problems). The base skin of FF3 is not bad at all, by the way, it’s simple and compact, but not ugly. If there’s an increase in rendering speed, i’m happy about it, although while browsing as usual there was no significant change. On the other hand, the settings panel and the bookmarks changed a lot, and there is a couple of other minor changes too, about which later.