Like Brad about every six months or so I check out many of the desktop operating systems out there to see what's new.  While I'm not an OS X fan in the least and have never been successful using it (like Brad due to lack of full Exchange support) that isn't the case with Linux.  Most of the major distributions come with Evolution which offers just about full Exchange support (Email, Contacts, Calendar and Tasks) and looks and works almost exactly like Outlook.  Sure there are some missing features but all-in-all it's completely workable (for me at least).

The good thing about Linux for me is there never has been one major deal breaker.  Usually I play with it for a few days and go back home to the Windows that I know and love (yes I think Vista is fantastic - there I said it).  This time could be different - every time I try this little experiment there are more and more reasons to switch to something like SuSE and fewer possible deal breakers.  All the apps I need are there: Evolution, Open Office (which reads/writes all MS Office file formats), Pidgin (for IM), etc, etc.  While I haven't done much multimedia with it yet the few things I have done (playing back MP3's and video files) has worked flawlessly.  Oh and the interface and graphic effects are pretty fantastic, Apple and Microsoft could both learn a few things from these guys.

I've saved the best part for last.  Those of you with iPhones know how great the App Store is right?  Well SuSE has a package management system that is extremely similar (actually it's been around for many years).  You just search for what you want, click install and let it do the rest.  Just like App Store it handles all the downloading for you, including installing any dependency packages you might need.  Very slick.

So if you're itching to play with the latest OS and Vista isn't your thing check out one of the Linux distros (I also plan to play with Ubuntu and Fedora soon).