Where has all the Ubuntu gone?

A while back I toyed with the idea of migrating my computer to Ubuntu. I never did, for a variety of reasons. The key one was getting Wifi to work on my Advent lappy - a problem a fair number of people seemed to be having, and no one had an answer which seemed to work consistently.

So I started playing with a few other distributions, though none felt right. I went back to just using XP on the home PC, and Vista on the laptop. I have grown to hate Vista - not for all the usual reasons, but just because it just shouldn't have been installed on such a low spec machine, and frankly that was my mistake for buying it preinstalled.

A few days ago I downloaded PCLinuxOS. Now, let me make one thing clear - one of the main reasons I think Linux hasn't taken off is that there are too many distributions, too many people developing too many variations, all that work spread too thinly. UBuntu appealed to me because of the large development team, and financial backing. It felt, and feels, professional, at least to me. Similarly I'm not a fan of the KDE desktop, which seems to be used in a growing number of distributions.

PCLinuxOS has a clunky name, a small development team, no guarantees about updates, almost too blatantly an attempt to rip off a few trademarks and worst of all, KDE. However, I thought I would give it a go - just to see if Wifi will work out of the box from the LiveCD.

Blow me, it did. OK, let's install it and play around with it. Ooh... it's fast, even will all the nifty 3D graphics which are thoroughly unnecessary but rather pretty. Let's download a different desktop environment (Gnome for me) and play a bit more.

Actually, I could grow to like this. Vista has all but gone on my laptop (it remains simply because I wasn't expecting to like PCLOS at all). Ubuntu's next release is due out in a few weeks and I'll certainly give it a try - if Wifi will work, or be made to work, this time around I may have a dilemma on my hands, but PCLOS is growing on me.

What does surprise me, however, is the abundance of decent Linux options, actual attempts to be alternatives to Windows, rather than just toys. I wonder if Linux is, finally, growing up?