Pain and Glory From the Trenches of the IT World

I just came across this great blog, Pain and Glory From the Trenches of the IT World, I'm not really sure who is behind it, other than being from IT (and I do believe it), but for a reasoned look at operating systems, hardware and general technology opinion, I find it to be a very good read.

For instance, he's of the opinion that converting an old PC into a home server is probably a waste of resources, and you're better off adding a hard drive to your existing PC if you need more storage.

And he things NetBSD would be a good OS for the One Laptop Per Child $100 PC initiative (which is currently using a cutdown Red Hat, I think). Here he's talking about Intel's low-cost PC made for the Third World (and not part of OLPC):

I have used NetBSD on a wide variety of older systems, and I have to say, it works wonders. When using NetBSD, it’s quite possible to turn old Sun SPARCstations into very capable mail servers or web proxies. Now, these low-end laptops are far, far more powerful than such obsolete Sun systems. The enjoyable experience of NetBSD on a 33 MHz SPARCstation 10 will no doubt be quite magnified on a 900 MHz Celeron-based system.

As you may have gathered -- and will gather upon more extensive reading, he's rather fond of NetBSD.

He also likes KDE as a desktop environment and thinks it's not just better but faster than GNOME, he again suggests NetBSD as an alternative to one of today's popular "low-spec" Linux distros, Xubuntu:

NetBSD is a truly remarkable and versatile system. And for many people, I think it would make a great alternative to lightweight Linux distributions like Xubuntu and Ubuntu Lite. The very philosophy of the project, that being widespread portability, will no doubt go a long way towards ensuring it remains a modern system that consumes minimal resources. If you’re currently a user of a minimalistic Linux distribution that you think is beginning to get bloated, maybe you should give NetBSD a try. It may just be exactly what you’re looking for.