mysilentfury

Like most nerds in my high school, I was always trying to figure out ways to get the best performance out of my PC. At that time, I didn’t have a lot of funds available to upgrade the hardware in my system, so imagine my excitement when I learned that there were more streamlined operating systems that demanded far less of my system resources than the current version of Windows (’98 I think).

I took my first trek into the world of Linux back in 2000 with a distro called Mandrake. I had such a hard time installing it on my Pentium I (75MHz processor) that I pretty much abandoned the idea as fast as it came to me. I even tried the 4 CD install on computers in my A+ Cert class, but still couldn’t get it to work. What a POS distro.

In 2007 I took another stab at it when a guy I worked with started telling me about this Linux distro that would pretty much work on any system out of the box so to speak. At the time, I was running Windows XP on an AMD64 2.2 GHz and again wasn’t in any position to upgrade my hardware. I’d never had any problems with XP per se, but, being the nerd I am, I wanted to see how much better this Linux distro would run on my system.

Ubuntu.com is where I eventually ended up and it changed my computing life forever. They had several different versions of Ubuntu there, for free download I might add, but the version that had caught my eye was the AMD64 edition. SWEET! I was totally floored by it after reading up on it on the forums because it brought features to the table that Windows XP x64 had left to be desired.

After downloading and burning the .iso I was surprised to see that it had this great “LiveCD” feature that allowed me to test the OS in it’s entirety without ever installing it on my hard drive.

After booting into the Live session, I entered my WiFi password and alakazam, I was surfing the net. I didn’t have to set up my network card. I played around with it a bit more, checking out all the programs and features and stuff and it hit me: Ubuntu never prompted me to install drivers or anything like that and yet everything just worked. I find I really like this “Ubuntu” thing so I decided to go ahead and actually install it.

A few clicks about my time zone, how I’d like to partition my HDD, do I want to install it alongside Windows, etc. and I was up and running. As I’m a new user, I left almost everything at the defaults. (I think I may have adjusted the partitions). About 25 minutes later, it tells me to remove the CD and reboot.

After the POST message, my brand new GRUB menu asks whether I’d like to boot into WinXP or Ubuntu. Of course, I choose Ubuntu. I’m up an running in about 1/2 the time or less than it would take to launch WinXP. I like this.

So now, here I am, at my new linux desktop. I’ve got the gold standard of internet browsers, Firefox, but I honestly don’t recognize 95% of the other programs I have. I’m sorta lost.

I then find out why Ubuntu is one of the best distro’s to start with; The absolutely massive and very helpful community. All it took to find out what I needed was a few keywords in the Ubuntu community forum search. I was totally in love.

The only reason I decided to keep Winbloze around was to sync and update my iphone, though I’ll admit, I beta-tested windows 7, and thought it was great. At least until the point where M$ demanded $300 for it. WTF? Ubuntu is just as full-featured, yet they manage to give it away. I’ve now installed a host of linux distro’s, but I stick to Ubuntu, because if Linux ever has a chance to seize a market, Ubuntu will be the flagship with it’s ease of setup and user friendly community. Windows will never again be my go-to-OS because with the help of volunteers and the fact that it’s open source, Ubuntu and the Linux community as a whole will just about always have access to programs and apps that can do everything Windows programs and apps can do, and in some cases, do it better.