Making the Switch
Ultimately. Well, not quite ultimately. However, after a trial period of approximately two weeks where I’ve been testing Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn, and I’ve finally found true love.
I’ve been using Ubuntu on and off since November 2005, just after the release of Breezy, where my initial interest in Linux was erected, and I quickly became accustomed to the look and feel, the speed of the terminal and the friendliness of the community—but after a few months of having used just about nothing but Linux, XP was calling me. Well, not so much XP—more Photoshop.
I left Ubuntu behind and moved on (but installed it on my laptop in the Summer of ‘06) on the desktop-side, and didn’t really look back. Since then, I’ve used Dapper and Edgy on my laptop, but I only use those for school, not enjoyment.
Needless to say, I was excited about trying Feisty when it was released (Beryl, XGL and whatnot), so I grabbed the LiveCD, stuck in the disk and installed it on a 16GiB partition. I loved it from the very beginning–its ease of use, its user interface (Emerald is sooo pretty) and just the general improvements that had been added to the system over the past 3 releases. I kept stuffing new data on my drive—amaroK, Pidgin, Wine, essential applications for any Windows to Linux convertee—needless to say I’d filled that partition to the brim within 7 days, and thus, I turned to gparted. To my horror, gparted destroyed my entire NTFS file system, and I left it for dead. Until today. I reformatted and re-partitioned my disk completely, which means Vista now has 50GiB, and Ubuntu has 189GiB (it’s officially a 250GiB drive, meh).
What I noticed upon the second installation of Ubuntu, was that it was a breeze–I’d installed the base system, texlive, pidgin.im, compiled irssi 0.8.11 installed and setup amaroK, setup Thunderbird and copied my songs from my Frets on Fire backup I had on a DVD disk. And all this in less than an hour. Amazing.
And now that I’m on Linux (for the 3rd time), I don’t think I’ll be looking back anytime soon. With a small partition for whatever graphic design work I need, I’ll be doing everything else on Linux from now on.
Update: I’m still yet to boot into Vista. Hell, I haven’t even got Firefox installed yet @_@
Lasse Havelund on May 6th, 2007
Tags: amarok, beryl, breezy, compiz, dapper, edgy, feisty, gparted, linux, Miscellaneous, nix, Ubuntu, unix, Vista, Windows, xgl
Jeremy responded on May 8th, 2007 at 1:17 am | permalink
How do you find Amarok? (The official capitalisation has changed.)
I have heard some very good reports about it, but I can never seem to stand it myself, and always find myself falling back to good ol’ Rhythmbox.
I use Thunderbird as well, but when it comes to managing 224MB of emails, it becomes dog slow.
Oh, by the way, “DVD disk” is redundant. ;)
Lasse Havelund responded on May 8th, 2007 at 7:29 am | permalink
Yeah, I know the capitalisation changed, but I still write “amaroK” out of habit (>.<)… It’s great; it has so much more functionality than Rhythmbox or Listen, and it just generally feels… awesome.
And I’d imagine Thunderbird is a hog with so many e-mails ;)… archive some? I mean, it has an export function for a reason :D
And yes, but I love the spelling of “disk” :D
Tim Rørstrøm responded on May 10th, 2007 at 10:18 pm | permalink
it’s officially a 250GiB drive, meh
Don’t manufactures usually refer to disk space in GB? That would almost fit the discrepancy in your figures (6-7 GiB off, but it’s better than the 11 you had :))
Tim Rørstrøm responded on May 10th, 2007 at 10:19 pm | permalink
Something fucked up in the layout of that comment, maybe it didn’t like blockqoute
Lasse Havelund responded on May 11th, 2007 at 9:23 am | permalink
Nope, that’s WordPress being a prat with the formatting in my previous comment. And I’ve gotten too used to typing “GiB” lately–it registers as 2..30-ish.
MenZa’s Weblog » Is Linux Ready to Go Mainstream? responded on June 25th, 2007 at 3:57 pm | permalink
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MenZa’s Weblog » Free != Bad responded on August 19th, 2007 at 12:07 am | permalink
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