After sepnding the last couple of days at work in close proximity to our development team who all run Ubuntu on their computers both at work and at home, I found a renewed desire to resurrect my linux box at home and make an earnest effort to move from Windows to Linux for most of my daily tasks. I think I’ve mostly accomplished that goal, but the road to freedom was not the easy one.

There has long been a debate between Linux fanboys and, well, everyone else about why and how one operating system is better than another. At the end of the day, most sentient people agreed that while Linux had some pretty clear advantages over Windows, its fatal flaw was that it was too bloody difficult to use for the uninitiated user.

Now, I am anything but an uninitiated user. But, I cut my teeth with DOS and the Windows environment. Aside from an extended experiment with a Comodore 64 in the late 1980s, Windows was how my computer world was oriented. Because Linux has such a dramatically different structure, translating operations between the two is somewhat difficult, at least for me.

Ubuntu set out to change all that, and to some degree they have. I was trying to find a GTK+ compiler last night to compile the source for xchat but then realized I didn’t need to because Ubuntu has a wonder Add/Remove Applications manager that downloads and installs additional applications for you. This is a huge step forward in getting the home user acclimated to a Linux environment.

But it is not complete. I had a bad video card driver and it took three hours and some help from an extremely gifted Linux guru friend of mine. I was relating to Tommy that I felt very ignorant and meek in using this operating system. I haven’t felt that way around a computer in quite some time.

But things are moving forward. I’m making a conscious effort to use the command line where possible because I believe that an understanding of the power involved with the effective application of the command line is crucial to further understanding the GUI’s role in managing the overall system. That same principle applies to DOS: it is often easier and faster to accomplish some tasks in the DOS command prompt than it is to use a Windows GUI.

It’s a little exciting to move to a new OS where the tumbleweeds roll freely across the plains. Oh wait, that tumbleweed is lagging a bit. I think I need more RAM…