benjamingolub.com

This school year I’ve made a complete transition to Linux. It started out with a desire to learn python and an idea for a celebrity gossip rss aggregator that might generate some ad revenue. So I bought an old desktop for $60, installed openSUSE 10.1, and started tinkering. I setup a wedding blog/gallery for my fiance and I. I taught myself some python and basically recreated the Planet Feed Reader since I was not aware of it at the time. But I was still under the impression that I was never going to be able to switch my personal laptop over to Linux.

Fast forward to finals week. I learn about Ubuntu, realize many of my issues with openSUSE (primarily YaST) don’t exist, and try out a live cd on my laptop. I’m hooked. I was holding out for Windows Vista but when I learned that Aero would not run on my Inspiron 700m with it’s Intel integrated graphics yet Beryl had no problem with it I completely forgot about Vista. Soon I had Kubuntu installed on my laptop, discovered some terrible issues it has with laptop screens (it forgets some settings, leaving you with a backlight that defaults back to turning off after 5 hours which can kill your battery life), and promptly switched to Ubuntu.

I thought I would hate Gnome but I actually found myself right at home. I’ve found an app for everything I did in Windows (including syncing my iPod, development, podcasts, photo management, etc) and even some that I never thought was possible (wiki-style note taking with Tomboy for class notes is amazing). I’ll get into these in later articles though. The one thing I can’t access is a windows/mac only service for listening to classical music, but I just use a VMWare instance of Windows XP for that.

I’m still learning and I’m enjoying every step of the way.