Terrible, terrible things

I finally bit the bullet. I've been whining about Windows since version 3.1. At first it was because I missed the DOS prompt and hated the mouse, and later it was because I hated the all-too-frequent crashes and lock-ups.

The beginning of the end happened when I gave up on Internet Explorer because of its secutity holes. At that time Firefox hadn't yet been released, and I hated Netscape more than IE, so I switched to Opera. The problem was that I was working for PsychicFreaks.com, and their writer's interface required Internet Explorer. No other browser would work on their site. I know because, besides trying with Opera, I set up a dual-boot Win/Linux system and tried various Linux browsers. Since most of my day was spent on TarotTurkey.com, I wound up spending most of my time in Windows, so the Linux never really got used. That was in 2002.

But I did like Linux a lot, and I vowed to chuck Windows altogether once I finished with that job.

Well, I did finish that job. And I did reformat the hard drive and toss Windows out the, er... window.

First I had to choose a distribution. The distro I used in 2002 was Mandrake, which I liked well enough. But I wanted to learn about what else was out there. It turns out that Mark Shuttleworth (the guy who made his millions selling Thawte to Verisign during the dot-com boom, then got on the news by becoming the first African to visit the space station) poured a whole lot of money into the development of a new Linux distribution named Ubuntu.



I read up on Ubuntu, read up on Shuttleworth and why he's pousing money down this particular hole, and I liked what I found in both cases. So I went with it.

As of about a month ago, I now have absolutely no commercial software installed on my computer (aside from Opera, the Linux version of which I haven't yet registered). No more MS-Office, no more Paintshop Pro, no more nothing! Ha! I'm learning my way through the Linux equivalents of my old Windows programs--OpenOffice and The Gimp in the above case--and having a ball doing so. Coming from Windows, the learning curve is negligible.



Some Linux equivalents I've not bothered with. No spyware scanners. No antivirus scanners. No defrag utilities. No firewall (the router's doing just fine at that job according to the software firewall I had running during the first three weeks). No problems. And everything is more stable and runs faster than ever before.

Sure I sweat bullets saying yes to the "Are you really, really, totally sure you want to reformat the Windows partition?" question, but it was worth it.

If you want to try Ubuntu for yourself they'll send you CDs for free (anywhere in the world, and they pay the shipping) via their Shipit program. One will be a live-CD, meaning you can pop it in and try out Ubuntu for yourself without it touching your Windows installation. You can check to see if it works with your hardware that way, too. On my system, everything worked right out of the box with no hassles.

Now if I could just end my love affair with Opera (never!) I'd have a totally free system.