My Linux Story

It is the time to tell how me and Linux had such a romantic story, I turned to be this person using Linux all the time and advising everybody else to use it. My first memories about Linux is that my elder brother ran Linux on the PC for university needs. It was just striking to see that something works "Windows", in my point of view. But I simply could not grasp it: Where is the Computer? I can not find the "My Computer" icon or any similar stuff.

Anyway, I spent a few more Windows years. I had a newer Pentium 4 PC running Windows normally till the hard drive crashed. Windows successfully took over the boot but never completed. I could not fix it. I could not format or repartition the drive, or even reinstall Windows. I just realized that the problem is about the hard drive. I asked one of my dearest friends what to do to retrieve my data, or how to fix the problem. He gave me a couple of CDs. One of them was the Simply Mepis 6.0 live CD. The other was Ubuntu 6.06.1 live CD. To my great amazement, it worked! Well, not really, as it crashed sometimes (kernel panics) because of the corrupt hard drive, but who cares? It works! For the first time in weeks I saw it working. With the help of my brother, I knew how to mount partitions, tar archives and do some ftp. Wonderful, after that all of my data were safe. I bought a new hard disk, and for a few months I continued to be the same Windows guy.

But the long waited day came. It was near the end of the semester, exactly a year ago. My PC caught a virus. I was so sure it is because I saw a process with its user as my network neighbour PC's name. I was furious. It is unbelievable that my neighbour's viruses were allowed to be run on my PC just because I have a network cable and Windows. Another factor in my decision was the release of Windows Vista with 1GB memory as a minimum requirement. Or at least 2GB as I am a so called developer. So, they simply decided I am not eligible to use Windows anymore. It was by the beginning of the vacation that I decided to ultimately depend on Linux.

After a few questions here and there, I downloaded Kubuntu 6.10 Live CD. I ran it, checked that everything worked perfectly. Then began the installation, the hardest point to me was partitioning the drives manually and setting the mount points (very unusual for a Windows user). But if you read the second paragraph, you would have known that I mounted partitions before. So, the installation ran smoothly. One point I would like to mention is that I was worried that resizing the windows partition may ruin my data. But, after being impressed by the live CD show, I said, "Open Source is never buggy in a harmful manner". I did a resize, and that was it.

A few days of hacking with Kubuntu, asking people how to do such and such, I was familiar with it. In less than four weeks I screwed it a few times. But finally, I was on a reliable operating system that I understand.

Months after, I noticed that Kubuntu is slow (not to mention how Windows was), so I tried Ubuntu 7.04. It was a lot faster. Besides, it was the first time to see a cube and such wonderful effects with Beryl.

Now I am on my new laptop, with Ubuntu 7.10, having compiz-fusion running all the time, with all features working perfectly, thanks to Ubuntu Forums. I can comfortably say now that I am not lacking any functionality. I have not turned on a windows for a complete month, and I needn't. My new Laptop (with 2GB memory) needs at least 7 minutes to run Vista, and that is simply a waste of time. It shuts down in 3 minutes. That is, if I started Vista three times a day, I am wasting 2% of my life waiting my computer. Not even counting the amount of time due to the fact that Windows runs slowly. However, the latest Ubuntu starts in exactly one minute, and turns off in a half. And it perfectly does the job.

Now I have more than 30 Linux CDs. The distributions I have are Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Gobuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, DSL (damn small linux), Mandrake, Simply MEPIS and Debian. And here goes the golden rule to fully depend on Linux:

Believe it or not, it is definitely doable in Linux, you just didn't search enough. Grasping the main ideas of Linux took me less than two weeks, just because I kept running it, and I did not return to MS Windows after the first failure.