Moving from Windows to Linux isn't the pain some people might think it is, apparently...
I like to think of myself as an 'early adopter' when it comes to technology. You know the type of person: somebody who buys or obtains a piece of technology or software long before it's properly been tried-and-tested in the real world.
Those of technical savvy around me tend to refer to me as a 'luser'. I always thought that meant I was a Linux User, but apparently it means something somewhat less complimentary.
This boils down mainly to the fact that I procure something, use it incorrectly, then have to beg, plead and wheedle with somebody far cleverer than me in order to get them to fix it, so that I can go ahead and break it again.
Many years ago, when Linux was in its infancy, I convinced our-then SysAdmin, Gavin, to put a version of KDE on to my office laptop. He thought it would be fine – I sold myself pretty well to him about my technical ability, but by the end of the first day of having Linux on my machine he wanted to kill me.
Shortly after that, he removed it from my computer and told me to never, ever, think about using anything other than Windows again.
And I didn't. Until last week, when I managed to convince my pseudo-SysAdmin for the pub, James, to install a version of Ubuntu on my laptop.
Clearly having wiped his memory of the pain I caused Gavin all those years ago, Jimi agreed – but I have to say what a difference it is these days to use Linux!
Firstly, everything seems much easier to get to, and I don't have to keep opening a terminal and typing obscure random commands such as chmod + x or sudo ./ every time I want to get the damned thing to do something.
Instead, I can simply go to Applications and Add/Remove programmes in a Windows-like way to install just what I want. I've even managed to go outside the box and find programmes such as AdobeAir and install them all perfectly fine. Google's Picasa and even aMSN, a clone of MSN's Live Messenger, have all been installed perfectly easily. (Probably best not to ask me about Google Earth on Linux, however. That seems to have gone like a bit of an abortion.)
And for what I really want, Mozilla FireFox is an excellent web browser and while OpenOffice's Writer might have the look and feel of an early version of MicroPro's WordStar, it's functional and usable and has all of the everyday features that Microsoft's Word supports.
To top it all off, I've even managed to find a website where I can leave my e-mail address so that somebody can let me know when Google Chrome for Linux is finally available. I'm especially proud of that one.
In fact, the only thing that I haven't been able to get to successfully work since having Ubuntu installed on my laptop is my printer.
Recently, in order to print off some forms I needed for a licensing event for the pub, I found myself having to reboot in to Windows for the first time in days. Unfortunately, Windows doesn't seem all that happy about having some of its gargantuan requirements for disk space taken up by the impertinent Linux OS, and so it ran incredibly slowly. Or maybe it did that anyway and I just didn't notice.
And then, for reasons utterly unfathomable, it threw a wobbly and broke the computer.
And for equally unfathomable reasons, James suddenly seems to not be answering his telephone..
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