Thoughts on Linux Transition

Which brings me to writing this one. For years I’ve been using varying versions of Windows as a so-called power-user, starting off with Windows 3.11 and hitting every single OS Microsoft has thrown at us since then. And of course, I have some resentments of my own regarding the redmonds and their – seemingly inferior – products. But I learned it to be that way, and that’s not easily cast aside.

Come as it may, some years ago I first took a peek into the world of UNIX, and some of its more popular offsprings, namely the Debian, SUSE and – much later – Ubuntu distributions. I never kept one for too long, though.

So, after reading jacks post about the differences between Windows and Linux, I started to wonder again why I didn’t manage to stay on, say, Ubuntu, which is in my biased and narrow-minded opinion by far the most suitable distribution for migrators.

After giving it some thought, it came down to the fact that I wasn’t able to do things on Linux the way I know them. Everything I tried ended up in me, digging the appropriate distribution’s forum and Google for a how-to or the solution to a more specific problem. While this seems indeed narrow-minded, like ‘how can he expect to know everything from the start and that everything works out-of-the-box’, it’s the way it is. Most of us spend 6-8 hours asleep, 8-10 hours at work and maybe have a family on top of that. No coffee or a single meal included. Do the math. I for myself cannot afford to put hours after hours into my OS to make things work that never were a problem before – mounting an external USB-drive, setting up or mounting (samba) shares to interact with my necessary Windows-clients. I’m not denying it that it is my lack of in-depth knowledge of Linux or UNIX in general that causes this, and neither that it bugs me from time to time I’m unable to pull it off, but that’s just how it is.

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I always said cynically “I’m trying Linux again once they reach final”, and I’m still sticking to that, predicting that the one Linux distro that manages to really implement the “easy as Windows”-feeling will succeed in getting the folks to migrate. It will probably succeed in getting me migrated, but right now, I’m putting my knowledge into my Windows-OS for an extra punch of productivity denied to me by the otherness of Linux.