About 10 years ago, I met a guy at some kind of community festival or something in Columbus, OH. He was running an open-source software booth. He gave me a CD pre-loaded with Red Hat Linux. I never used the CD, but I’ve sort of followed the development of increasingly user-friendly (translate: n00b-friendly) Linux distributions since then. Recently (3 or 4 years back) I decided it was finally worth my while to take the plunge. Note that I still dilly-dallied for a while.
I have an older tower in the back office that I don’t use much, now that I have this spiffy laptop from work. It just got a 500GB second hard drive installed in it, back in May. Last night, I finally rolled up my sleeves and got to work. It turns out Ubuntu is now insanely easy to install. Easier than Windows, in my case. Lots easier. No hardware issues, everything detected perfectly (even the USB ports that are only recognized 1/4 of the time in XP were mounted automatically and with no issues).
The most jarringly pleasant difference from installing Windows was the absence of repeated phone calls to Microsoft’s Genuine Windows Validation Hotline, trying to explain that, no, I was not a skanky software pirate, selling unauthorized multi-terminal licenses of their precious product; I was simply trying to install said bleepenating product on my computer for the fifth time because it kept crashing during install, and would they please unlblock the software I just spent loads of money on and was trying to legally use. Continue reading →