New Computer, New OS

I've been threatening to do this for months, but as of last night I am now a Linux user.

Let me explain:

I've been getting more and more fed up with running Windows. I've gotten tired with the annual cycle of wiping the machine and reinstalling in order to keep it running smoothly. My current machine is months overdue or it's annual lobotomy, and it rungs like crap because of it. Now Microsoft has released Vista... which most people seem to think is about as useful an upgrade to XP as spending a few hundred dollars to poke oneself in the eye.

I tried going to Mac a few years ago, but I like computer games too much to stick myself with a Mac. Most games won't run on a Mac, and dual-booting a Mac into windows is possible but it doesn't get you the nice hardware that makes running games on a PC a good experience. It would also require me to get a whole new computer, one that is overly expensive because you pay for brand and style. Plus, I'm not one of those people.

Instead I took some advice from people at work and I'm giving Ubuntu a try. Confused? I thought you might be. Ubuntu is one of the derivations of Linux. Linux, being a hacker Open Source built and maintained operating system, has a lot of variations, and variations on variation, and sub configurations of those variations... you get the idea. I messed around with a few Linux distributions in 2005(?) but didn't find any of them ready for prime time. I figured they might be up to par now and my coworkers and friends all pointed me toward Ubuntu.

The big realizations that most of what I do with my computer is fairly mainstream easy stuff. I surf the web a lot. I check my e-mail. I use the office suit. I instant message friends. Easy stuff, and it's more then 80% of my time on the computer. I only sometimes do power user things. I build webpages, use photoshop, and run high end computer games. I only need to be running windows those 20% of the time... I could be using any OS the rest of the time. In fact, by doing all those things in Windows I was slowing down the system and making a mess out of Windows... which was why my games were running worse. So I decided I should be running some other OS when doing normal everyday stuff, and using Windows only when gaming.

I kept putting off setting this up, of course, because it's a pain to wipe and reinstall. Then a guy at work put his gaming PC up for sale at work. Nice machine, and he was looking for far less then it's parts would be worth new. It was about as much as it would cost me to upgrade my system again, and this time it had the advantage of being something I could work on while my current machine was perfectly alive across the room... so a heck of a lot easier to upgrade and migrate... So I bought it (I paid cash and offered to pick it up while some of my coworkers were still checking with their spouses about if they could buy it. Hell, I checked with my turtle and he was cool with it.) I picked it up last night, wiped it, installed windows, and then installed Ubuntu.

I'm still configuring everything in both OS's but so far it looks like a good move. Ubuntu is very user friendly, and seems a hell of a lot less bloated or issue prone then Windows. I won't have to worry about picking up viruses, spyware, and other malware issues while just surfing the web and using OpenOffice.

I'll let you know how it goes.