software

A lot of my co-workers don’t under­stand why I loathe Win­dows (or any­thing Microsoft) so much. Nor would they “get” why the news today that the fac­ulty are get­ting new lap­top com­put­ers run­ning Win­dows 7 to replace our desk­top com­put­ers made me bang my head on the desk. Sev­eral times.

My cur­rent desk­top com­puter is set up to allow me to boot into either Win­dows XP or Ubuntu Linux. I NEVER boot into Win­dows. That com­puter much more sta­ble and use­able for me with Ubuntu, and man­ag­ing it is a breeze, even though I have to do all the tech sup­port on it myself.

Did you ever have to upgrade or rein­stall your ver­sion of Win­dows? Remem­ber what a pain it almost cer­tainly was? Con­trast that with yesterday’s Ubuntu Linux upgrade. Ubuntu released ver­sion 9.10, aka “Karmic Koala,” this week­end. It’s one of their every-eighteen-months “Long-Term Sup­port” releases as opposed to the every-six-months reg­u­lar releases, so it has to be in primo con­di­tion when it hits the Inter­net. So…

I logged into my com­puter yes­ter­day morn­ing and saw that the new ver­sion was ready. I clicked on the “Upgrade” but­ton, and checked email & such while the com­puter did the pre­lim­i­nary info-gathering and prep work. When it told me what would be needed as far as down­load­ing & upgrad­ing com­po­nents, I clicked on the “Con­tinue” button.

Once I saw that every­thing had down­loaded suc­cess­fully and the actual install had started, I headed for class. Four hours later I came back to see a mes­sage that a num­ber of com­po­nents were no longer needed and could be removed if I wanted. I did, so I clicked “Remove,” waited another cou­ple of min­utes, and was then informed that the sys­tem was ready for the end-of-upgrade reboot. Two min­utes later, I’m rebooted, logged in, and every­thing is pretty much WORKING CORRECTLY!!!

Let’s see. Click, click, go away, click, ONE reboot, DONE. Per­fectly pain­less, even on the flakey com­puter, and no out-of-pocket cost. I still have two more machines (my net­book & DH’s com­puter) to do and I bet it’ll be the same thing.

Still won­der why I’m a Linux gal?

If I can man­age to “legally” make the new lap­top into a dual-boot com­puter like my cur­rent one, I will not whine too much. If not that lap­top is going to become a very expen­sive paper­weight on my desk, most likely!