Back to the World of Windows
A good friend from #wordpress, Podz, has been chronicling his switch from Windows to Ubuntu Linux, and now back to windows on his blog. His latest post about the switch explains why he made his choice. I must say, Podz must have infinite patience, as he stuck with Ubuntu for a bit of time. I, however, couldn’t even last a day with it being my primary OS. Ubuntu markets itself as Linux for Human Beings, and yes, it was more user-friendly than other Linux systems I have tried (gentoo is not for the faint of heart), but if Linux ever wants to make it to a wider audience, it has to make it so Joe Schmo can install it and use it with ease. I realize that the reason we find Linux hard is because, as Linux groupies would say, we’ve been trained to do things the wrong way with Windows our entire lives. While this may be true, that’s not going to help them get any converts. The #ubuntu support channel was helpful when I installed it, but the learning curve was steep enough that I gave up, and returned to XP. Knowing that uber-genius Podz did the same, I no longer feel like such a dolt. So, if you really do want an alternative to Windows but don’t want to learn Linux and suffer the trials and tribulations that Podz and many others have suffered, maybe you should, I can’t believe I’m saying this, get a Mac.
I am currently running Ubuntu at home. I got a virus on Windows XP (my fault, though) and instead of taking the time to reformat, reinstall, and reconfigure (or debug, find, and eliminate a rootkit virus) I just re-installed Ubuntu. I had been on Ubuntu for a couple of months and went back to XP because I missed the “completeness” of being on Windows. This time back in Ubuntu, I feel much more at home.
I do like my Desktop a certain way. I found out that mounting things in /media/ will make them appear on the places menu, so my two other drives (NTFS and FAT32) are easily accessable. I’ve got a my computer icon on the desktop, as well as a trash icon (taken off the bottom panel) and I’ve moved the desktop switcher to a 4×4 square and put it in the corner (and I actually make great use of it now) I get rid of all the brown and make it blue, with the Tango icon set. I installed Firefox 1.5 on my own with some instructions I found somewhere. And the only icons I’ve got for quick launching on my top panel are Firefox and Terminal. After that, I’ve got basically all the defaults. I would do about 4x as much tweaking in Windows.
However, I did take a Linux class in College that helped me learn the Linux basics as well as the ability to be very useful in the command line (I really only use it to connect to my webserver). And I joined a Linux club in college (I got scholarship money to do so, so keep it down over there) and got to learn how to become productive in Linux, using all of it’s native apps. So I guess I have a head start. But my wireless card (desktop computer) works fine as does all my other stuff.
I guess I should say that I rarely ever use anything OpenOffice.org, and when I do, I curse the loading times. And I still hate gaim. And I still have no great text editor, which I think is Linux’s biggest sham. But for the limited uses I have it for (watching movies/dvds, email, web browsing, downloading torrents, and talking to friends) it works suprisingly well. I just seem much much happier my second time around.
@Mike and any other OO.o users:
You can greatly increase the speed of OpenOffice on any platform (Win or Lin) by going into Options->OpenOffice.org->Java and disable the option to use a Java runtime environment. You’ll be floored by the difference.
Thanks for the tip. While it does dramatically increase the speed of OO.o (BTW, get a new name) I am in no way floored by the difference or the speed in general. It’s still takes me like 5.5 seconds for it to start up, and that’s just crazy. Though it does take me like 2.5 for Firefox to start up, which drives me bonkers too. Again, thanks.
What was it about Linux that was too difficult? I’ve never understood this complaint. The most coherent response is usually “Well, it doesn’t work exactly like Windows.” OK, well Windows XP doesn’t behave exactly like Windows 98. So what?
mostly it’s because the things that are supposed to be better about linux, just weren’t. it’s supposed to be faster, and it was, but not enough to really base switching OSs. It’s supposed to be more stable, and as you can see in podz’s case, that wasn’t the truth. even when i had it installed for that short period, i had some stability issues with apps. i wasn’t looking for something that works exactly like windows. i was looking for a good desktop os and linux is not that, in my opinion. linux is great at being a server, but has some catching up to do as a desktop os.