Until two years ago, I had always been a faithful Linux user. Well, excluding the fact that when I was really little we had this ancient machine running Windows 3.1 that liked to devour itself from the inside (it’s kind of a long story, but when I was little — like six or seven — I liked to learn about geography1 by reading an atlas and summarising the information on all the countries in a .doc file… it got corrupted so often that it was up to copy #17 before I finally gave up). But, after that machine finally managed to devour its own important system files, we got a new one, and it ran Red Hat Linux. At some point Red Hat became Fedora, so we used that, and we upgraded it periodically until at the end of 2007 I finally got a new laptop with Vista pre-installed and decided to stick with Vista.

Sure, there are advantages to Vista. iTunes is incredibly useful for a lazy person such as me who still loves finding new and slightly not-mainstream music. So convenient! Then there are the games… even though The Sims 2 is the only one I play, if I went back to Linux, I couldn’t play it.

But the problem is… I hate Vista. I LOATHE it. I DESPISE it with a FIERY PASSION. Vista hates me too, which is why it’s so slow, and why it crashes at the most irritating times, and… is really, really slow. Do you want to know how slow it is? When I log in, I can leave the room for ten minutes, and when I come back, it probably still won’t be done. Opening Firefox takes five minutes. It bugs me 569872 times a day about Windows Update, or the latest version of Java, and I get so sick of my stupid antivirus program bugging me repeatedly with the slogan, “Virus database has been updated!” I get a popup about it and it freezes all my other programs so I have no choice but to pay attention. OK, I’m glad you updated your database, but I don’t want to know. If you’re so incompetent that you refuse to update your database, THAT’S when I want to know. I would think the fact that you pose as effective antivirus protection would imply in itself that you update your database, and I DON’T CARE, and STOP FREEZING MY PROGRAMS TO TELL ME ABOUT IT.

Seriously, it’s like the virus protection is worse than the virus at times… like when it updates three times in one day.

Or when my laptop, which is supposed to be “sleeping”, turns itself back on when I am sleeping and plays the stupid “virus database has been updated” message and wakes me up. I was so angry that day!

Anyway, this post is supposed to be about Ubuntu, isn’t it? So, the other day I decided I missed the good old days of Linux usage. You know, back when antivirus programs were unnecessary, and it didn’t take as long to load as Vista does, and I got to use the text editor of awesomeness that is gedit rather than the piece of crap that is Notepad, and when my operating system knew what the hell \n was (i.e. a line break) and didn’t cram entire text documents onto one line… those were the days!

This realisation that I wanted Linux back spurred me into action, and I finally decided to install Ubuntu on my laptop. After first downloading it from the Internet. I suspect Vista was trying to force me to stop, because it kept throwing up alerts like “WHAT YOU’RE DOING ISN’T SAFE, PLEASE STOP” (which I ignored) and finally it resorted to crashing halfway through the 700MB download. Or more than halfway. Like 500MB through. Every time the download stopped abruptly like that the installer insisted on starting all over again, which was infuriating.

It took a few attempts, initially because I didn’t understand at first that the entire point of the Windows installer is that YOU DON’T NEED A SECOND PARTITION, and since I tried creating one for it there was no GUI. Somehow. When I’d worked that one out, that was when Windows started crashing repeatedly at 200MB, 500MB, etc. downloaded. At last, I finally managed to get the entire thing installed.

My initial thoughts are generally positive. Here are some highlights:

  • SO MUCH FASTER
  • no annoying alerts from Windows Update, Java, the anti-virus program, etc.
  • Firefox is a million times faster without all my add-ons loaded into it. I added two ones I considered absolutely vital, but I refuse to check which add-ons I have in Windows and add them to Ubuntu Firefox… if I don’t miss it, why reinstall it?
  • Ubuntu lets me change the default keyboard layout! Windows lets me change it from QWERTY to Dvorak left-hand, but only after I’ve logged in. Ubuntu lets me change it at the login screen, and remembers my changed setting so every subsequent time I boot up Ubuntu, I don’t even have to change it.

But then there’s the bad:

  • While I can play unprotected MP4 files from iTunes in Rhythmbox, I can’t play the protected ones… which is mostly fine, but there are a couple of albums I really like, and I refuse to pay 50c to “upgrade” a file I already legally bought (see how pirating has so many more advantages!)
  • No Flash plug-in for Firefox. Well, there is one, but it keeps bugging out so I can’t install it. This one had better be resolved because not being able to see Flash files has made me realise just how much I want to see them.
  • The default operating system is still Windows. Since my usual habit after turning the laptop on is to walk away for several minutes while I wait, and I only get ten seconds to change it from Windows to Ubuntu, I NEVER realise my mistake within the actual time period I have to rectify it.

After this minimal amount of time using Ubuntu, though, I am glad I installed it, and intend to boot into it rather than Windows a lot more often. Well, at least, if I can work out how to get the Flash plug-in to install, because that one is really annoying…

  1. Not that this is why I got a 46 in Geography!