While working on another project, I set up my Raspberry Pi (revision B) with Raspbian. Although it was a bit time consuming, it was not difficult at all. Instead of using the default desktop environment (LXDE), I decided to try out Raspian Mate as it’s a fork of the well-loved GNOME 2 desktop environment.
I was happy to see that GNOME 2 was still alive and well. I used to run Ubuntu on my home computers, but abandoned it when they switched over to GNOME 3 and Unity. The lack of features in GNOME 3, the clunky Unity interface and the poor device support in Ubuntu pushed me over the edge. I sold out to Macintosh and happily resigned myself to never having to look at xorg.conf ever again.
It surprises me how far computers have come already in my lifetime. As a little girl, I remember playing with my grandfather’s Color Computer 2. It seemed remarkable at the time and I never expected computing to progress as rapidly as it has. For some perspective, the CoCo2 cost $240 in 1983 and had 16KB of RAM and an 8 bit processor at 1 MHz. Twenty years later, the Raspberry Pi costs $35 and has 512 MB of RAM and a 32 bit processor at 700 MHz. It will be interesting to see what the next twenty years brings.
