Aubergine coloured kool-aide

How does one become an open source user? All my life I have been surrounded by proprietary software solutions, solutions that required money, or were freeware. I never really knew about open source software. It wasn’t until I bought a netbook while traveling in India that I would get the opportunity to use a real free operating system.

A good idea at the time

After purchasing the EeePC I started to read up on it. I read a number of posts that claimed that “netbook were perfect or Linux.” That got me thinking, “I should install Linux on this machine”.

Freedom through obscurity

Lots of people will tell you that by running Linux in itself you are being obscure, but I wanted to take it one step further, I downloaded some little known distro which promised an experience all itself. To be honest, I don’t remember what it was, all I remember thinking is that I would dual boot, so no matter how bad or odd it was, I could always use Windows.

This distro didn’t have a nice smooth installer like the one you find with Ubuntu, and I didn’t know what I was doing, never mind the difference between ext3, ext4 and ntfs. After installing this obscure distro of Linux, I rebooted and waited…but something didn’t work right. It wouldn’t boot, and there I was, with a brick, wondering what to do next.

Windows?? gone Linux?? won’t boot oh shit

Pass the aubergine coloured kool-aid please

I didn’t have a choice, I had access to another computer (which was 5 years old…running Ubuntu). I tried to get Windows installed, but when you don’t have a CDrom drive, there isn’t much you can do. So I drank the kool-aide.

Installing Ubuntu is a snap, and it kind of fun. As the installer chugged away, I was given tips of what I could do with my machine. I was told of the software the was included and shown screen shots of my new future life working with Ubuntu.

Never look back…well sort of

After being forced to use Ubuntu for 5 months, you soon realize that you can everything you want to do on your computer with free open source software. In fact, in a lot of ways it is better then Windows. Setting up a server is easy, getting software is easy, getting geeky is easy, all the tools are part of the standard installation.

After arriving back in Canada, I turned my main computer into a Ubuntu machine and started to use it everyday. I started designing websites, built on Drupal, and having a Linux OS makes things easier (Drush). I started to learn terminal commands, and to this day my favourite tool is vim. In fact, I would using nothing but Linux (at work, at home) if it wasn’t for one program, Illustrator (and a lesser extent, Photoshop).

Current state

Last night I installed the newest version of Ubuntu, and it is pretty good. Sure there are some problems, but overall, it is pretty good. The new HUD is great, it is fast, it even works with my nVidia video card. So if your wondering whether you should try Linux, I would say, do it, you will likely be surprised how much Windows actually sucks.