full circle magazine #65
33
MY STORY
When I caved and started to use
Windows, I was looking around for
an alternative. At the university I
was using Unix, but that looked
unusable. There was also Linux,
with RedHat and other
distributions, but it looked harder
to work with than Windows. The
“read me first” documentation was
several hundred pages long. At a
large computer conference, I was
offered a free CD with something
new, named Ubuntu. I never heard
of it before, and the CD lay around
on my desk for years without being
used. But the name Ubuntu kept
coming back in the media, and,
when there was an “introduction
party” (everybody loves a good
party) for Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term
Support, I decided that it was time
to learn more about it. Well, it
wasn’t a real party, but everywhere
there were happy looking faces
and I was impressed with what I
saw. Especially Virtualbox got my
attention. When I left, I got a FREE
CD with Ubuntu on it. How can it
be FREE? Even the CD itself must
have cost a lot of money to
produce – especially that large
number of CD's. But I learned that
Ubuntu is more than an operating
system. It is part of a community in
which people do things for others,
gladly, without asking for payment
of any kind, although a thank you
note is appreciated.
I installed a dual-boot and was
surprised with the short time it
took (15 minutes instead of a
whole day, no motherboard drivers
needed, etc.). When I tried to
change the visual effects, it told
me it did not have the drivers to do
that (bummer). And then it asked:
“shall I get it for you?”. Yes, of
course! All done.
But I needed a lot of time to get
used to the Ubuntu way. And I also
needed to get things done, so I
went back to using Windows. I
tried several times, whenever I had
the time to play around (full job,
single parent, girlfriend an hou r
drive away), but I gave up when I
bought a new CPU/motherboard
and Ubuntu refused to work on the
new CPU. But I did keep Googling
about Ubuntu, and found an ISO-
file with Ubuntu 10.04.2 on the
Ubuntu website. Later I realised
that I could expect this, as 10.04 is
a LTS version, and my new CPU did
not exist when 10.04 was created,
so it needed to be updated.
At this moment, I am using
11.10 because I wanted to program
in Pascal, and 10.04 did not have
Lazarus/FreePascal in its
repository. The rare Windows
programs for which there are no
suitable Linux replacement (yet)
are running in (each his own)
VirtualBox virtual computer.
Everything beautiful and
perfect? Unfortunately…. no. In
the early days of Ubuntu, there
were bugs in the programs and
even in the kernel. But as time
progressed, things got better.
Bugs were fixed, the kernel
became more stable, things
became more intuitive to
accomplish (GUI instead of
terminal…). But then there was
Unity. All kinds of things didn’t
work any more, and the internet
was filled with people telling the
world this was wrong. To start a
program you need to know and
type its name instead of selecting
it from a list with a mouse click, as
in Windows. If I would be a
Windows convert, I would walk
away and never look back. What
are the people behind Ubuntu
thinking? In a forum about creating
desktop icons to start a program,
one of the developers of Unity
replied with “It’s only 50% ready,
the next version will have
everything fixed”. My reply was
that “if it is not ready, do not