mark avey’s blog

With the news of the imminent release of Vista (Wow ), I had the urge to try out another operating system. I wasn’t going to pay those prices to increase yet further the size of Big Bill’s wallet, nor could I see any real benefit of moving to Vista, so I had a look at Ubuntu. I’d dabbled with Linux distro’s in the past, but always had some reason to move back to Windows, mainly because it was, frankly, a pain to install anything. It looks like Ubuntu may be a keeper.

I’ve had a dual-boot system (Ubuntu/Windows XP) for about a month now. The only reason I go back to XP is for my Flight Simulator X sessions. For all those other applications that need Windows, I either run it under Ubuntu using Wine, or use my XP virtual machine running inside Virtual Box, a fantastic virtual machine application. For non-game applications, XP running as a virtual machine is not noticeably slower than when running natively, which is an impressive feat.

The more I use Ubuntu, the more I like it. I like that it auto-updates all my applications. I like that it’s stable and fast. Very fast. I rarely find myself watching the hard drive light flashing away as I used to under Windows. When I switch back to Windows for my Flight Sim fix and need to browse the web for something, I find myself getting very impatient waiting for the paging file access to settle down and the general “clunkiness” of it all.

Basically, using Ubuntu is a pleasing experience. It’s also fun. It’s nice not having to particularly worry about virus’ or spyware. So far, I’ve been running Ubuntu without any antivirus or spyware detection and, touch wood, haven’t been hit yet. (Guess that comment is asking for trouble!). If I did get hit, I know I could get back up and running with a complete reinstall in less than an hour. Compare that with about 5 hours for XP, once you throw in all the drivers, antivirus etc.

Take a look at 30 Days with Linux for a very level-headed assessment.

I’ll be writing more Ubuntu posts over the coming months, I suspect.

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