A Week With Linux
Saturday, February 10th, 2007Linux. For most people it’s that barely known other OS. It’s that weird thing that supergeeks know about and think is so much better than Windows. It’s something that doesn’t matter, but that people keep saying will dethrone Microsoft one day. I’m what you would consider a Power User, someone who knows everything about his computer, built the thing himself and can take it from clean format to precision insturment within a day. Someone who uses the keyboard as much as the mouse, knows exactly what everything in Control Panel does. Someone who isn’t just comfortable with Windows, someone who knows it without thinking.
We’re usually the biggest detractors of Windows behind the Apple people. Why? Because we see both sides of the system, we see how intergral this product is to the technolgical world and we see all the flaws that glaringly seem to be continually ignored, or just laughed at. The fact that something the majority of computer users depend on costs so much money it can easily be the biggest expenditure in a custom built midrange system. Things like this bother us, and we take the other things, the Good things for granted. We see the fact we have to leave automatic updates on just to try to reign in security flaws that seem ever multiplying, we don’t see the fact that this automatic system takes over something we would normally worry about. We see it when an updated driver breaks the system, and don’t notice the other 20 drivers that are working without a single hitch. We’re very critical, but it never really occurs to us to leave. Windows, with all its flaws, is safe, dependable, like an old pair of sneakers. There are holes in the toes, and they’re not the most stylish pieces of footwear but you’ve had them forever and they’re as relaxing as can be.
I ended up making the full switch to Ubuntu, a new Linux distrubution that is hailed as very user friendly compared to its brethren, it wasn’t exactly planned, but several unrelated factors caused me to erase my Windows installation completely and put this distribution on my machine instead. (more…)
