Brian Briggs, maintainer of the humor-site BBSpot, writes about his experiences giving Linux a try:
I doubt I’ll make the complete switch anytime soon, but my first experience definitely makes it a consideration. I’ll need to make a list of applications that I use on a daily basis and try to search out a Linux counterpart. Fortunately that process is a bit easier for me since I use Mozilla as my browser and OpenOffice.org as my office suite. I foresee that I’ll slowly make the transition. […]
I find such accounts of using Linux heartening, as I hope to psych myself up to do the same (as soon as I have lesser things to worry about).
What’s all this hummming and hawing about? It’s not like it’s something of incredible importance. Just do it. Or don’t do it.
The “hummming and hawing”, as you so put it, is because I have my computer working just right for my job search. I have all of my job data (such as search logs) on my computer, including addresses and phone numbers of jobs to which I have applied.
So, I wouldn’t want to lose any of that information, even if it was only temporarily for a few days (during the transition).
Another issue is hard drive space — I don’t have enough for a Linux installation. And, I’m not in the position to buy a new one at the moment, either ;).
Hard drive space? Linux takes up *much* less than Windows.
Of course, you could be talking about dual boot…
Whenever I had a dual-boot setup, I found myself never booting into the “other” OS. I say go 100% one way or the other.
Personally, I stopped using Linux. I got tired of Linux being so behind on multimedia stuff, for example. When your core tasks revolve around a/v stuff, IM, Email and the Web, Linux doesn’t make much sense at all. Windows XP is just so darn easy. No more of this “oh boy, I have a voice recorder on my gnome desktop now–nevermind that windows had that feature 10 years ago, etc.”-type enthusiasm. :-)