About a year ago now I made the best computing decision of my adult life. It was a cold and snowy evening at my apartment, and good-ole’ XP was ready for its bi-yearly rebuild. It just seemed that every 6-8 months it would be dogging real badly, and the only true fix was to completely rebuild. I had been using command-line Linux for about 5 months but hadn’t been comfortable enough to use it as a desktop yet. I had played in some older versions of Ubuntu, a Debian-based desktop OS, but always got discouraged and forgot about it. Since I was faced with a rebuild I decided to grow a pair and just take the plunge: I backed up my data and proceeded to install the Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) CD that had been laying on my desk for months. It was very different. The GUI contained the basic elements of what I was used to in Windows, but seemed to lack some functionality that I had been used to. The command-line was the same as Debian, so that was OK for me, but figuring out how to make things work was very time-consuming and tedious at first. Most of my time was spent in a web browser, and since FireFox is included with Ubuntu that was familiar. I found many things that seemed to be only 75% working, some things that I couldn’t get to work properly, and some things that I just plain didn’t understand well enough to do. Shortly after install, the graphical interface Gnome drove me insane and I again rebuilt. That or I severely broke my X display manager while trying to install nVidia drivers…something like that

My next attempt was Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft). MUCH nicer display manager! Arguably more windows-like than Gnome (Ubuntu), but just overall more flexible and powerful. Enter the light of the K Desktop Environment. KDE wasn’t the only pleasant surprise that I encountered, but many of the bugs and annoyances I found in 6.06 had been fixed. There were still a few times when I managed to break things pretty good, but the entire experience was much nicer. I still had trouble making things work as I wanted, but that was from my own inexperience. I kept learning.

The nice thing about the Ubuntu family is that a new version is released about every six months. Each version (so far) has managed to fix all bugs/annoyances from the previous, and also found new and useful ways to make the experience more streamlined. The next release was 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), the first *new* release I would install, and at this time I decided to convert my work laptop as well. The greatest challenge was to get dual-display working with my HP laptop (read: failed for two weeks and moved to a Dell laptop), but everything else ‘just worked’. Since we rely heavily on the Check Point software to perform our jobs, and it runs only on Windows, I installed VMWare server onto my laptop and created an XP virtual machine. I allocated 512MB of memory to make it run smoothly, and overall it works pretty well. I did upgrade my laptop to 2GB of memory and that helps the performance of my machine tremendously while the XP VM is running.

Version 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbons) was recently released, and included a nice method to install it as an upgrade package to the existing version. It required approx 600MB of new packages and replaced damn-near every file on the system, but it worked pretty well. I’ve been running it for about two months now and have not had one bit of trouble. Thinking back, I have not had a single kernel panic or major application crash since running the 7.x versions. Rock solid!

What drove me to write this article actually wasn’t my dislike for Windows, but more my desire to share that (K)Ubuntu Linux is nearly ready to be a real desktop OS, and you should use it! It’s not quite ready for everyday “end users”, as you really do have to understand command-line Linux (or be willing to learn it) and break out of the Windows mentality. The latter was the hardest part for me. If you stick with it though, the reward of accomplishment is great. Knowing how to Google is another important skill too I am finally 100% comfortable running Linux for my daily OS, and every challenge is getting easier, dare I say fun. I have managed to make just about anything that I need to work, work: All of the games that I play work, hell just last week I was able to install Diablo II right from the Windows/Mac Installation CD! It just worked. I can open/edit/create MS Office documents (sans Visio , make my own PDFs directly from OpenOffice, charge my Blackberry via USB (PIM support is on the way), browse any windows file-shares that are on any networks, wireless networking just works, 3d-rendering works, my cellular air-card works… I can even run my iPod without needing iTunes! I think the only thing that I cannot do is make this thing throw a BSOD To top it off I also have the full power of a real command-line operating system. The tools available make troubleshooting networks much easier, and having logfiles to tell me exactly what my system is doing is nice for figuring out things on my local machine. There are no limits to what I can do, I just have to decide what I want, and make it happen. I have to say that I am hooked and can never go back to Windows for a daily-driver.

If anybody is interested in making the switch, you can download Kubuntu at http://www.kubuntu.org. I also recommend checking out http://ubuntuforums.org, a great resource and community for helping people succeed with Ubuntu-based distributions. Pick your flavor, boot to the Live CD to test it out, then double-click the Install icon and run with it. You will eventually thank me

Linux, I <3 you!