Monday, May 19, 2008
Switching to Ubuntu
After a long, painful WIndows experience, I finally switched to Linux for my laptop. This was partly due to continual security problems, even with the gargantuan Symantec tools, which leads to my second issue: speed. There seems to be countless services being dropped in by every little software distributor in existence. Mostly, they lurk looking for updates to download, but who knows what other purposes some of these may have in mind.
Software manufacturers, I am putting you on notice. I own the hardware, and your software is purchased for my use. The hardware is not yours to do as you please. So, you have now lost a source of revenue thanks to your disregard of my personal property.
I know Linux also has its share of daemons. A simple ps shows lots and lots of running processes on an idle system, but I can point to a specific operation of feature that each of these perform, and I can look at the source to make sure it does what its supposed to. Also, the underlying operating system is fundamentally more secure, so I don't have to worry about architectural design flaws making my system a playground for a script kiddie or other hacker. Plus, it boots faster, runs faster, and is generally much easier to use.
The switch took place about a month ago, and while I consider the switch a success, I did have to make the system dual boot because there are three programs for which I cannot find Linux equivalents. I would gladly buy an upgrade to Linux in each case, since I bought the original licenses and they were not cheap (several hundred dollars each). Unfortunately, the software developer does not yet support Linux. Until then, I occasionally will have to boot to Windows, but for that 99% of the time where I do not have to, I am much happier.
I can now say that my computing environment is pretty much Microsoft free.
Software manufacturers, I am putting you on notice. I own the hardware, and your software is purchased for my use. The hardware is not yours to do as you please. So, you have now lost a source of revenue thanks to your disregard of my personal property.
I know Linux also has its share of daemons. A simple ps shows lots and lots of running processes on an idle system, but I can point to a specific operation of feature that each of these perform, and I can look at the source to make sure it does what its supposed to. Also, the underlying operating system is fundamentally more secure, so I don't have to worry about architectural design flaws making my system a playground for a script kiddie or other hacker. Plus, it boots faster, runs faster, and is generally much easier to use.
The switch took place about a month ago, and while I consider the switch a success, I did have to make the system dual boot because there are three programs for which I cannot find Linux equivalents. I would gladly buy an upgrade to Linux in each case, since I bought the original licenses and they were not cheap (several hundred dollars each). Unfortunately, the software developer does not yet support Linux. Until then, I occasionally will have to boot to Windows, but for that 99% of the time where I do not have to, I am much happier.
I can now say that my computing environment is pretty much Microsoft free.
# posted by Pat Villani @ 4:04 AM 
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Copyright Pasquale J. Villani