A month with Ubuntu

About a month ago I found myself finally seeking an alternative to Windows. I had before tinkered with a Linux distribution but I found myself somewhat lost & soon reverted to Windows. The reason I wished to try again was simple, disgust at Windows Vista.

The reasons for my not liking Vista (and Windows in general) were manifold. Firstly I greatly disliked the way Vista used a huge chunk of my system resources just to run. I upgraded from one gig to two gigs of RAM in order to stop my hard drive thrashing every five minutes but still found that this was not really enough. Furthermore I was shocked to find that my processor would almost constantly be running at between 20% & 35%. Furthermore there are several more general reasons for me disliking Windows such as the additional cost of just about everything, its massive instability, all the viruses/registry errors & the validation process which causes me to feel like a criminal or at best a man who cannot be trusted.

So it was that a few months after "upgrading" to Vista I found myself actively seeking an alternative. Given that I use a 64bit processor OS X, whilst just about possible, was never really an option. This left me with two real options, both of which were open source, namely Linux & free BSD. Having used Linux before I felt that this was probably more sensible than attempting something completely alien to me.

Of course Linux itself is not, strictly speaking, a complete operating system in its own right. Instead Linux refers to the kernel at the centre of the system & there are several hundreds of different complete operating systems, based on that Kernel, available - each called a distribution or distro. The question then became which distribution to use.

In the past I had chosen a distribution called Dream Linux, which I believe had been created in Portugal, simply because it looked more impressive/attractive than other distributions. Since then however I had learnt that the appearance of Linux based systems is almost completely customisable as the GUI is simply a module. So I instead chose to look for a distro which was simple to use & had a large community for support. For the sake of simplicity I decided a debian based distro was the best choice due to the ease with which it allows the user to install & upgrade applications, through the debian package system. Then came the community support requirement. In the past Linux forums had been known for being highly technical & none to fond of those they deemed to be "noobs". I had however heard that the Ubuntu community prided itself on being helpful to new users & that the entire Ubuntu operating system was itself geared towards ease of use.

Thus I chose to install Ubuntu as my operating system just over a month ago & since then I have had nothing but good experiences. It took me just over two hours to learn the basics of using the system & since then I believe that I have probably become more skilled with Linux in a month than I ever could've been with Windows.

Furthermore open source software is something you can actually be enthusiastic about & over the course of the past month I have found myself promoting it more & more to anyone who will listen. Not only is open source free but it is also completely without viruses & far more stable than Windows thanks to all the work that goes into it. A week ago I convinced my brother to try using it & he too was thrilled with the results claiming that his ancient machine had never worked so well. All in all changing to Ubuntu Linux has really helped me get more from my computer & what's better is that I no longer feel exploited by the monopoly power of Microsoft.