On January this year, I decided it was time to get a new computer. May be catch a boxing day deal. After choosing a nice quad core with 4 GB of RAM, I realize one 'small' problem with this Dell: it comes with Vista. Any other options for the OS? Nope, it's Vista or Vista.

If, at the time, I had not had previous experience with Vista, I would've been happy to get it. But another box I had bought for the living room came with Vista, so I knew it.

And this is what was in my mind: Vista can make my new Quad core run like an old XT 8088. I won't even notice that I have 4 GB of RAM, Vista will swallow it whole with nothing left for me to run vi. It is big, and it is slow.

Next is the stability. I saw Vista crashing too often. The file explorer at least once a day.

So, as I was looking at the checkout screen of the Dell site, instead of having a nice picture of productivity and speed, I could see only dark Vista clouds.

Oh well, there's no other option. Actually, there is. When the box arrived, I had a CD ready with Ubuntu 7. I was not a Linux fan for the desktop, but I had heard good things about it.

Since then, its been a good 6 months and I can't be happier about that decision. I was lucky Microsoft bullies Dell to the point that XP was not an option. Otherwise I would be running XP now, which is better than Vista but no match for Ubuntu. Yes, if the box would have been bundled with XP, I would have stayed with 'bad but known', rather than try something radically new.

It is fair to assume that, since I run an open source project, I am some sort of open source fanatic that dislikes anything coming from Microsoft. The reality is different. I dread the thought of wasting precious time learning a new OS. Actually, I care little about the OS, I just want an OS that stays out of the way.

Switching to Ubuntu was far easier than I thought. Past encounters with Linux desktops meant downloading exotic libraries and compiling source code every time I need to install anything. Ubuntu had none of that. Far from it, installing packages like Java or MySql is actually easier than on Windows! Download, install and configuration is done all in one simple step, I still can't believe it.

No doubt that the fact that I was running mostly open source applications made the switch easier. Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office are available for both Windows and Linux,

My experience with Ubuntu lead me to start recommending it for the servers running jBilling for new customers.

Thanks to the Ubuntu team for saving my desktop. ;)

Cheers,

Emiliano Conde
Lead Developer - jBilling
emiliano@jbilling.com
jBilling.com