4 Years of Ubuntu

I played around with a few Linux distributions before finally biting the bullet and loading Ubuntu 7.04 as a dual boot on my Windows XP machine at home. For those needing a secret decoder ring, the year of the version is before the decimal point, the month, after (i.e. April 2007). Before I knew it, I found myself living in that partition and rarely booting up windows. Ubuntu was great then, and has been getting gradually better since (new version every 6 months with a long term super stable version every two years).

I compare that with the battles I have at work trying to keep my XP desktop running. I'm constantly doing maintenance on it (most of which is contrary to IT policy). The antivirus and other corporate software is constantly in the way. The computer fragments easily and the registry is constantly getting corrupted. It halts, does funny things, and crashes at the worst possible times. Yes, as an engineer who writes some of my own software, I'm hard on a machine. But I have the same problem at home on my wife's computer at home, and all she does is surf the web and do E-mail.

With Ubuntu, I run Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome and other applications that I was using before in Windows, but THIS operating system keeps going and going. For every hundred strange or annoying things Windows does, Ubuntu does maybe one. I rarely reboot it, and in fact, I rarely even think about it. Isn't that the way a computer SHOULD be?