Well, a big day has arrived at the Helland home. I have officially taken the plunge and installed myself a Linux-based OS (Ubuntu 8.04). For those unfamiliar with what this entails, in simplest terms it means this: I’m replacing Windows with a free operating system. More information on Ubuntu is available at its homepage: http://www.ubuntu.com
What prompted such a change? Many things, in fact:
1) Vista. Vista is an abomination to computing in general. I could go on for some time about why this is, but the primary reason is simple: it makes my daily tasks more difficult, not easier. Computers are tools that exist to simplify and enhance my life – not bog it down with uninformative, useless UAC warnings.
2) Price. OSes aren’t getting any cheaper, and I refuse to pay for a piece of crap like Vista. XP is now 7 years old and I’ve been looking at upgrades….but nothing catches my eye like a free OS. (And NO – I’d rather die than switch to Mac OSX, not to mention the hardware such a switch would require.)
3) Speed. I love XP – and frankly, I couldn’t be happier with it – but XP’s time is drawing to a close. I have tweaked my XP install in every way I can concoct: registry cleanup, defrags of every kind, removal of unnecessary software. I’ve even gone so far as to disable a bunch of semi-necessary services in an attempt to get it to run a bit snappier. After all that, XP is still too sluggish for my tastes – so barring a clean install or hardware upgrades, I’m outta ideas.
4) FOSS is awesome. I love the idea of supporting the free, open-source world. Programs like Firefox and OpenOffice.org have made my life and job 100x easier, and I’d love to be able to contribute something back to that scene. I’ve tried to support that world with my free programming tutorials and source code (some of which is available here), but with my programming down to a trickle, it’s time for something bigger and better.
5) Need more storage and don’t want to migrate XP. I picked up a new SATA hard drive to replace my aging 80gb PATA one, and because this will be the 4th hard drive I’ve had to migrate my XP install onto, I’ll have to call Microsoft to reactivate XP. I hate doing that. It’s a legal install, I have a key, these have all been personal hard drives in the same frigging box – so no, I’m not sticking XP on my new drive. I was originally going to use the new drive solely for file storage, but the SATA interface will almost certainly help my overall OS speed. It’s a shame Microsoft had to implement activation. Had they not, they might not have lost a happy, legal user like myself.
6) Prettiness. XP is great, functional, familiar…but not so pretty. One thing I will give Vista is that it looks very nice. But – as always – those looks come at a horrible performance trade-off. Short of strange unstable hacks, I’d like to bring my computer desktop into the 21st century.
Over the coming days, I’ll detail some of my observations in making the switch from XP to Ubuntu. If there’s anything in particular that you’re curious about, please let me know. I’d be more then happy to help anyone else repeat the experiment.
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