With the advent of Windows Vista approaching (forever) a much less ballyhoo'ed release is that of Fedora Core 5, by Red Hat.

Microsoft are hiring and firing the bright sparks of the industry to create the best desktop possible. A horse that runs on any course. The fastest and bestest there is.

Meantime, Linux has gone from being a baby, through a bit of an adolescence before being considered mature and stable enough to rely upon it for mission critical applications.

We like Red Hat, our friends down the hall like Debian and someone upstairs uses Xandros. Application development and office applications work well in Linux. Easily, quietly and inexpensively.

Meantime, am considering how to upgrade machines for Vista. XP runs run on current top of the range hardware - but will Vista? I don't know.

But I do know that Fedora Core 5 (a full fledged Linux install with professional databases, webservers, security, Office apps, and miles of excellent programming languages, plus superb graphics tools and web publishing tools) runs just fine on this old Celeron 1200 with only 512M of RAM. It would be nice to get a new grunt 64 bit machine. With Windows, I would replace my PC. With Linux I would recycle the old machine.

It really is a different idea.