Resisting the Evil Empire

Four weeks ago I reformatted my Windows XP installation by accident. I had been running Ubuntu Linux thru a vmware guest and thought it was okay if not a bit sluggish. Since I had most of my data files on another disk it wasn’t as big a loss as it initially sounds. When it was time to rebuild my computer I decided to go for it and install Ubuntu instead of Windows XP or Vista beta 2.

I have tried to get away from using Windows several times in the past and I’ve always gone back for one reason or another. Whether it was an inability to get my GDI printer working in FreeBSD, OpenOffice failing to properly render my MS Word resume, or experiencing random system instabilities that I was unable to decipher there was always something that I just couldn’t get done in *nix to force me back to Windows.

Let me state that I am neither anti-Microsoft nor an open source zealot ala Richard Stallman. The truth is I make my living, meeger as it may be, as a Windows Network Administrator. I simply want to ensure that Microsoft has enough viable competition to keep them honest. So far IBM, Novell and Apple have proven not up to the task. I do believe that, if left to their own devices, Micro$oft would happily charge us all $750 apiece for the latest & greatest versions of Windows and MS Office. At those prices we’d still only be permitted to install them on one computer. That’s money I put back in my pocket (translation - spend on something else).

I’ve installed Ubuntu Linux 6.06 on my main workstation, which has dual 1.8ghz Xeon processors, 1.5GB RAM, Radeon 8500 video, a 36GB SCSI disk for the OS and a 250GB IDE disk for storage. It’s now over five years old but still pretty responsive. I can see myself using this box for another two years or so.