Yep. The title gives away much of what I'm going to be talking about in this post. But I won't be glorifying Linux for something it isn't. Instead I'm going to be talking about things that I like about it.
Linux wasn't the first operating system I had. I was only 15 years old when I first had a chance to even see a PC. That was about 10 years ago and since then my knowledge on computers have improved vastly. I'm not talking about improvements where I'm a computer geek sitting around in front of my laptop all day and hacking away at my keyboard. I am talking mostly about the experience and what I feel are ups and downs to using a computer system.
Windows 98 was the first OS I encountered. The first thing me and my sister did after it was setup was try to connect to Internet. Without a modem... And then when our ambitious efforts did not yield anything we tried to play a movie. That wasn't on the hard disk... How did we even begin to do this? We got around to a point of creating a new file. And as the name of that file we gave a query-like statement, which if my memory doesn't fail me was something like 'find and play movie'. For all over innocent efforts, we ended with a empty text file sitting on the desktop called 'find and play movie'.
Since then windows experience have always had more downs than ups. There was that time when I deleted the OS files to free up space from my 4GB hard disk to make space for music. And then we mastered games like Solitaire, Minesweeper, Hearts and thought it was a big deal. Viruses weren't a big problem back then for me as I didn't have an Internet connection until a few years back. Pen drives and external hard disks came much later on
With the advent of Windows XP, came the OS that I thought I would have forever. It also gave me a chance to play around and learn how to do a clean installation of an OS on to my computer. Yeah, XP cds were flying around everywhere where I come from, no copyright bullshit. All the CDs had the same serial number and these were days when Microsoft hadn't quite started to worry about software piracy. At the same time XP came around, I still had 4GB hard disk, which I knew by now, wouldn't quite cut it. So I safe-crashed my hard disk (which included pulling out the power cable from the hard drive), convinced my dad that it was going-going-and-gone, had him buy me a 40GB hard disk and soon I had 44GBs of space on my computer.
Unfortunately, at the time XP was released, a lot of floppy disks started coming into our house. These usually had some old DOS games like Mario and I cant really comment about the malicious nature of the software that came. Soon it became CDs and I had to get a CD rack. Then it became portable hard disks and pen drives and that's where my virus woes began. There was a time when I cleanly installed XP, over and over again every month for 2 years. The notion of anti-virus had escaped my line of thought, shouldn't Microsoft be releasing a secure OS that doesn't allow viruses to get through? Or should the OS come bundled with a free and effective anti-virus?
Then came my office days and it was during these days I really got involved with activities on the computer other then watching pirated movies and playing pirated games. Now I was playing around with pirated software. Pirated versions of Maya, 3DMax, Office suite and Macromedia Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop and the whole lot of them. My virus woes were pretty much the same as before and now I had an Internet connection and my computer at home and office were more deadly biochemical weapons. Then the turning came point when an IT guy in my office showed me a Linux variant called Knoppix which he booted live and used to recover work related files from a hard disk that refused to boot Windows. And at this point I been shown the light
I brief google search gave me all the info I needed to know about this 'Linux' and soon I had Mandrake Linux running on my computer at home. A bit of fidgeting around with it proved that it wasn't stable... but all the software for free? That was a good deal to me. A few more months of usage and hacking away at the terminal and I realised that I been blind to this OS for so long. Soon I went from Mandrake to the much stable Mandriva Linux which taught me a lot about Linux. And soon Ubuntu came along and then I found my dream OS
I been using Ubuntu now for 4 years and never looked back. When I look back on to friends who uses Windows (vista and seven) I see that there virus woes are same as before and it bugs me when they beg me to fix their problems. Sure... u can play better games on Windows (for now) but thats about it, right? There are propriety software that Linux based ones can't beat at their game, but what good is it when those software are pirated and the cracked version brings home a dozen of viruses, worms, keyloggers?
Why I like Linux? I have an OS on my computer and laptop without spending a dime (there are propriety software for Linux and versions of Linux that are sold, which I never used), almost never crashes (there have been one or two occasions... in four years!), its been virus free (always have been, hopefully always will be), I can customize it in ways that makes Windows users weep. When it comes to inability to run games, I have a Playstation and Xbos for doing just that. At least I wont have to worry about overheating motherboards and never ending upgrades to my system/graphics cards to meet the specifications of the latest games.
In short... I would remove Windows XP from laptop ASAP and get back 10GBs which I would put to better use as a Linux partition. It would be a farewell to Windows, goodbye to Microsoft and their corporate profit making machine, sayonara to windows based applications and bye bye to all the experience I had on that OS.
Linux wasn't the first operating system I had. I was only 15 years old when I first had a chance to even see a PC. That was about 10 years ago and since then my knowledge on computers have improved vastly. I'm not talking about improvements where I'm a computer geek sitting around in front of my laptop all day and hacking away at my keyboard. I am talking mostly about the experience and what I feel are ups and downs to using a computer system.
Since then windows experience have always had more downs than ups. There was that time when I deleted the OS files to free up space from my 4GB hard disk to make space for music. And then we mastered games like Solitaire, Minesweeper, Hearts and thought it was a big deal. Viruses weren't a big problem back then for me as I didn't have an Internet connection until a few years back. Pen drives and external hard disks came much later on
With the advent of Windows XP, came the OS that I thought I would have forever. It also gave me a chance to play around and learn how to do a clean installation of an OS on to my computer. Yeah, XP cds were flying around everywhere where I come from, no copyright bullshit. All the CDs had the same serial number and these were days when Microsoft hadn't quite started to worry about software piracy. At the same time XP came around, I still had 4GB hard disk, which I knew by now, wouldn't quite cut it. So I safe-crashed my hard disk (which included pulling out the power cable from the hard drive), convinced my dad that it was going-going-and-gone, had him buy me a 40GB hard disk and soon I had 44GBs of space on my computer.
Unfortunately, at the time XP was released, a lot of floppy disks started coming into our house. These usually had some old DOS games like Mario and I cant really comment about the malicious nature of the software that came. Soon it became CDs and I had to get a CD rack. Then it became portable hard disks and pen drives and that's where my virus woes began. There was a time when I cleanly installed XP, over and over again every month for 2 years. The notion of anti-virus had escaped my line of thought, shouldn't Microsoft be releasing a secure OS that doesn't allow viruses to get through? Or should the OS come bundled with a free and effective anti-virus?
I brief google search gave me all the info I needed to know about this 'Linux' and soon I had Mandrake Linux running on my computer at home. A bit of fidgeting around with it proved that it wasn't stable... but all the software for free? That was a good deal to me. A few more months of usage and hacking away at the terminal and I realised that I been blind to this OS for so long. Soon I went from Mandrake to the much stable Mandriva Linux which taught me a lot about Linux. And soon Ubuntu came along and then I found my dream OS
I been using Ubuntu now for 4 years and never looked back. When I look back on to friends who uses Windows (vista and seven) I see that there virus woes are same as before and it bugs me when they beg me to fix their problems. Sure... u can play better games on Windows (for now) but thats about it, right? There are propriety software that Linux based ones can't beat at their game, but what good is it when those software are pirated and the cracked version brings home a dozen of viruses, worms, keyloggers?
Why I like Linux? I have an OS on my computer and laptop without spending a dime (there are propriety software for Linux and versions of Linux that are sold, which I never used), almost never crashes (there have been one or two occasions... in four years!), its been virus free (always have been, hopefully always will be), I can customize it in ways that makes Windows users weep. When it comes to inability to run games, I have a Playstation and Xbos for doing just that. At least I wont have to worry about overheating motherboards and never ending upgrades to my system/graphics cards to meet the specifications of the latest games.
In short... I would remove Windows XP from laptop ASAP and get back 10GBs which I would put to better use as a Linux partition. It would be a farewell to Windows, goodbye to Microsoft and their corporate profit making machine, sayonara to windows based applications and bye bye to all the experience I had on that OS.
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