Fond farewell to Feisty
A belated farewell to the Feisty Fawn, the Ubuntu release that tipped the seesaw for me, finally persuading me to abandon Windows for my day to day computing. I noticed the support “end of life” notice on the ubuntu.com website yesterday and couldn’t help but sigh.
I joined the Ubuntu party with version 6.06, but it wasn’t until 7.04 that I felt comfortable making the jump. Feisty ran as well on my desktops and server as it did on our relatively low-spec family laptop. Of course it wasn’t perfect, but it was plenty good enough. I don’t mind admitting that I would get a warm, tingly feeling (put your mind back in the gutter!) whenever I saw the splash screen as the system booted. That boot logo had come to represent security, reliability, power, freedom, ease-of-use, and crucially, Ubuntu’s inclusive and tolerant community.
A big thanks to all who made it possible: GNU, the kernel maintainers, Debian, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical, the Ubuntu developers and community, and the tens of thousands of programmers, hackers, project managers, bug reporters, documentation writers, financial contributers, etc. etc. from the Free and open source software communities who have made and continue to make it all possible. What an awesome and worthy endeavour GNU/Linux is.
Here’s looking forward to Intrepid!
Tags: Free software, Linux, Ubuntu