Switching to Ubuntu
Dec 27th, 2008 by Nick
Anyone that knows me knows I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft. This got worse when I got a new Latitude D630 at work and it had Vista on it. I wanted to like it, I told myself that I had to run Vista for at least 3 months, I went back to XP after 2 months and waited for Vista SP1 to come out. SP1 came out, I waited a month and then moved back to Vista. I ran Vista for quite a while with VMWare Workstation running ubuntu server to run all of my scripts/testing. Two weeks ago Microsoft pushed out updates, I clicked install, set my laptop down and went to bed. Get to work the next morning, press the power button and Vista blue screened, rebooted, blue screened. Tried safe mode, blue screen, I gave up.
Luckily, I had also been dual-booting Ubuntu 8.10 since it had been released in October. I hadn’t touched it in quite a while but I needed a web browser to get work done so I thought it would do in a pinch. Going on two weeks and I’m still on Ubuntu and am killing my windows partitions this weekend so I have more space. I would not say this has been easy and I can see where a desktop user might struggle with this to some extent.
One of the things that made the transition easier is that 6 months ago our office converted from regular pop3/smtp to Google Apps for Domains Premium. Six months ago I made a decision to get rid of outlook and instead read email via the web browser. I also decided to start using google docs for the bulk of my document needs. I haven’t had any issue with email, google docs definitely is not a complete Word replacement but it is more than enough for my needs. By doing this all of my documents and email were already stored “in the cloud” so I didn’t have to worry about migrating them over.
Most of my time at work is spent in a telnet/ssh client or web browser, reading pdf’s, RDP’d into windows servers. Ubuntu has all the tools that I need for this. The only program that I really do miss is Microsoft Visio. Sure there is DIA but in all honesty it isn’t very good compared to visio. Working on getting Wine and visio up/running this weekend. More to come as things unfold.
