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The Bird is the Word
The post you are currently reading is the first one composed on my newly Microsoft-free laptop. Yes, that’s right: after years of grumbling about The Redmond Borg Collective and their crappy, bug-ridden, vulnerable, proprietary OS and software, I finally took the plunge and installed Linux. I’ve always been attracted to the idea of Open Source software and have used it with Windows whenever possible, but I was leery of Linux. While I’m reasonably tech-savvy, I had little interest in an OS that required me to constantly type in command prompts and scour the interwebs looking for drivers, and the concept of installing software by downloading and compiling tarballs (or hairballs or whatever the hell those things are called) made my eyes glaze over.
The beauty of Open Source software, however, is that someone is always working on it and figuring out new and innovative ways to make it better. There are many different versions of Linux, but Ubuntu is the one I settled on, because it seems the most user-friendly and similar to the familiar Windows or Mac “point and click” environment. And it’s easy to install; simply download it from their site, burn it onto a cd, pop the cd in and reboot your computer. During the install, all you have to do is enter a few basic configuration details (username, password, time/date, language, etc) and it does the rest for you.
Since the school I work for is nonprofit and has to generate all its operating expenses through fundraising, I had a further reason to mess with Linux: to save money. Microsoft’s exorbitant costs, licensing fees, and ever-more odious “validation” requirements are a major concern to an organization as cash-strapped as ours. Sure, Microsoft does donate a lot of software to schools and libraries, but each new version of Windows gets exponentially larger and hogs more system resources and processing power, necessitating the purchase of newer and faster computers. It’s an expense we simply cannot afford.
Because this is a school, the version of Ubuntu I eventually gravitated to is Edubuntu, which comes with quite a bit of preinstalled educational software. It also comes with Open Office, a free software suite that replaces Microsoft Office (which retails for anywhere from $200 to $500 per copy, depending on the version.) Open Office can save documents in Microsoft Office formats (meaning you won’t lose all your documents if you switch over) and has versions available for both Windows and Linux. For my browser, I use Mozilla, and after consulting with always-helpful tech guru Kables, I settled on Amarok and VLC as my music and DVD players, respectively. Linux is much more virus-proof than Windows, but I installed the free version of Avast Antivirus just to be safe.
The greatest aspect of this conversion is that my laptop, an old Gateway Solo 9300 with a Pentium III chip and a 20GB hard drive, now runs much faster than it did with Windows 2000. (Due to its age and lack of RAM and processor speed, I never even bothered trying to upgrade to XP.) My home computer, on the other hand, is fairly new and came with XP installed. Since I’ve had no major problems with it so far, I will probably leave it as-is for awhile. However, once Microsoft stops supporting XP in order to force everyone to upgrade to that turd sandwich Vista, I will ditch The Borg entirely and never look back.
