I realized the other day that this month marks the 10 year anniversary of my first installation of the Linux operating system on my home computer.
I had heard about Linux for several years before, but never really had the courage to try it out for myself. Then I picked up a new harddrive for my computer, and didn’t have any plans for my old harddrive. So February of 2005, I installed my old harddrive as a secondary drive on my computer and installed Linux to it, with the option at computer startup to go into either Linux or Windows (although the default was set for Windows).
I must admit, it didn’t take me long to be impressed.
The operating system was fast and stable, and it had software that did everything I wanted to do for home use. Web browser? Firefox was the default option. Word processing and spreadsheets? OpenOffice.org, and later LibreOffice, did everything I needed and wanted. Photo editing? There are few programs more powerful than GIMP. Watching videos? VLC Player is one of the best out there.
And best of all, the software was all freely and legally available to download.
Yeah, it took me a while to get used to the operating system. The file structure was different, some key commands I was used to didn’t work, things along that nature. But that didn’t mean Linux was harder to use. It just took some getting used to.
Still, I was just testing Linux. I had Windows at home, I used Windows at work. I didn’t see any reason to just drop Windows. But I found myself using Linux more and more as time went on. And I noticed that how Linux did somethings made more sense than how Windows did those things.
By the fall of 2005, I was using Linux more than I was using Windows. In the summer of 2006, I did an upgrade to my Linux distribution and simultaneously made Linux my default operating system instead of Windows.
Still, I felt somewhat alone using Linux. I had communicated with people online about it, but I had never really talked to anyone offline who as familiar with it (unless they heard it from me). That changed in the fall of 2006. I attended the Ohio LinuxFest for the first time. I suddenly found myself in a room with over 1,000 people who had all not only heard of Linux, but used it regularly. That was an empowering experience for me.
In 2007, I rebuilt my home computer. This time, I didn’t put Windows on it at all. My home computer has run nothing but Linux ever since. And nothing I’ve seen has done anything to convince me that I should consider putting Windows back on my home computer.
The more I use Linux at home, the more frustrated I get with Windows at work. Comparatively, it is slow, unstable, insecure, and difficult to maintain. But on the other hand, I am the IT guy at my office, and I have not been able to convince my coworkers to switch to Linux. Consequently, I often say, “If Microsoft made stable, reliable products that did what they were supposed to, I’d be out of a job. I owe Microsoft a thank-you letter for keeping me employed.”
In the meantime, I’m proud to be able to say that I don’t use Microsoft products (or Apple products) at home, nor do I have any intention of moving back away from Linux. Linux does everything I want it to do. Who could ask for anything more?
