So then... this time it will be different. After a bit of a think about what I actually use my boxes for at home I ordered 1±1 netbooks from Dell.* No CD/DVD, no HDD, no fan and the disc is replaced by a SSD. No Moving Parts. And I ordered them with Ubuntu Linux.
Windows is the ultimate moving part. The mean time to effective failure, i.e., the point at which you switch it off and on to make it behave, is maybe two or three days. The mean time to total failure (reinstall the OS) is maybe 18 months.
Now I'm no slouch with windows. I've installed nearly every version from 3.1 to XP (I skipped ME)and have been the go-to guy for windows problems amongst friends, family and colleagues for most of that time. For a couple of years, in my spare time, I supported a network of 6 Win2K boxes at a lab I worked in. Not professional support work perhaps, but the next best thing. For me RegEdit holds no fear.
So why am I binning all that experience? Not just with the OS but with all the OS-specific applications. There's actually, a myriad of reasons, but just to pick one... it's the lack of transparency. As touched upon in last week's post it's the sense of opacity. Your understanding can proceed this far and no farther. After that it is black box built upon black box. Learning how to work in this environment isn't real learning, it's voodoo, it's mysticism. It's shaping your expectations to the arbitary failings of an chinese room with ADHD. It's turn three times and spit to avoid the wrath from high atop the thing... There are times that, I swear, if I could have sacrificed a chicken over a windows box to make the damn thing work I would have done so with no compunction.
To be honest though, this isn't the first time I've installed Linux. Back in 2003 I installed Red Hat as a dual boot on my desktop box. It was a real pain to do and I never managed to get the graphics drivers working right. Consequently the screen flicker would give me a blinder of a headache after about 30 minutes. I used it less and less frequently and in the end didn't bother restoring it after the next sesquiannual windows reinstall. Both by reputation and in my experience (albeit 6 years ago) linux has a vicious learning curve on it.
But this time I planned for that. Buy a system with it pre-installed and the learning curve looks like this
instead of like this
To be fair to the Ubuntu guys though the thing did work out of the box. Easier, I'd have to say, than the typical windows install. Getting onto my home wifi was a two-click process. A leftover 3-button mouse and (more impressively) my Intuous-2 graphics tablet worked on plugin with no software jiggery-pokery necessary.
Of course I kept fiddling with things until I broke something. Before I quite grokked the escalate-to-admin privilege paradigm I created a admin account called "admin". This seemed to be a reserved word and resulted in me suddenly having no accounts with admin privileges. Strange choices in the boot configuration by Dell made this harder to fix than it need have been, and made my actual learning curve look like this
but we got there in the end.
Am I happy with Ubuntu Linux? Oh yes. The GUI is slick, professional, and easy to use. Going back to the command line underneath it was something like returning to the UNIX labs of my youth. Pipes and man pages. Chmod and grep and awk and sed. Really though the reasons are the inverse of those for bailing on Windows. The sense of transparency and trustworthiness, of not being played for a sucker. Finally, finally, leaving the voodoo tribe.
* I order one. Dell cancel the order. I order another. Dell uncancel the first order and promise to deliver both. The idea of two netbooks to play with wasn't entirely unpleasant so I just rolled with it at that point: "Order from Dell and hope like hell".
