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My journey started with Unix when I was a student at UW-Madison. As a Computer Science student in the 90’s, all CS course work was done on Sun Sparc/Solaris machines. I was pretty fascinated by this Unix world, and the different flavors available at college, which included HP-UX and DEC. They just felt more powerful in computing power than Windows at that time. However, it was not practical to buy a UNIX machine for personal use, nor was any of my class homework possible on Unix.
The UW-Madison CS department had an underground lab where the geeky CS students spent hours doing research work. Many of the lab machines ran an alternative operating system called Linux. This was the alternative to UNIX that I could bring home. So, sometime in 1997, I decided to install Redhat on my desktop PC. Installation went smoothly and my experience with Linux started.
My early years with Linux were not very smooth. I wasted many hours trying to get a custom kernel to compile. Then get modem drivers, the sound card, graphics card, Quake 3, and so on to work. Thanks to the various Linux forums and volunteers for their guidance. Linux was still very immature at that point in time, but I wasn’t giving up. Small victories gave me a sense of achievement. When Redhat spun off and created Fedora, that was my first change. I stuck with Fedora for quite a few years, and had gotten comfortable using KDE and some of the cool features it provided (eg: Amarok).
After a while, I got tired of the plug-and-pray world of Fedora, with things breaking from one upgrade to another, and decided to research other Linux flavors, with a focus on something that is a lot more user-friendly and with hardware and peripherals working out-of-the-box. That’s where I came across Ubuntu. My first installation was Kubuntu Feisty in 2007, and I instantly preferred it over Fedora. The environment was cleaner and worked a lot more seamlessly with hardware.
Over time I jumped from Kubuntu to Ubuntu and finally to Xubuntu. I realized that I needed something that was lightweight on RAM, and worked efficiently on old hardware/laptops. I stopped caring about bells and whistles from KDE or Gnome. I don’t do programming any more, but am comfortable working with the command-line when required.
I currently dual-boot my laptop and live in Windows during the week, and switch to Xubuntu during the weekends. Now that almost everything works as well in Ubuntu, I prefer to stick to Ubuntu. For the last three upgrades, things have gone very smoothly and not disrupted my dual-boot environment.
What I like about Xubuntu is that it’s fast, has a good interface, allows me to mount my NTFS data partition that I share with Windows, and doesn’t slow down the system with unnecessary background services. Most of the apps that I use 90% of the time on my laptop work very well in Xubuntu. Gimp is a great replacement for beginner photo editors like me. And I have the best set of rotating wallpapers thanks to Variety and wallhaven.
What I don’t like about Ubuntu - there are still some things which I miss from Windows. I haven’t been able to find a good linux app that will do a BPM analysis of my songs AND store the value in the respective mp3 files, nor a good replacement for a WYSIWYG app like Dreamweaver. I’m a big Excel geek, and LibreOffice or OpenOffice just don’t compare, so I have to subscribe to Crossover Linux to install and use MS Office. Java doesn’t work in Chromium. I can't get Quicken to work in Xubuntu or Crossover. And, in some ways, the Windows UI is a lot crisper than my current setup.
Nonetheless, I enjoy using Xubuntu and hope to continue being a devoted user for a long time. Congrats to FCM, and I look forward to reading 100 more.