Look Ma, I’m on Linux!
I belong to Generation Y and just like the majority in my generation, I got my first computer in 2002 loaded with Microsoft Windows 98. I grew up in the world of computers with Windows, and I’ve used every desktop version released till Vista. But as part of my new year resolution to go Open Source, from December I started researching about Linux and it’s various flavours, and finally zeroed in on the two most popular ones: Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10. I did trial runs in the last week of December using both the distributions.
Finally, On January 1st 2009, I made the switch to Linux. Completely. No dual booting. No more Windows!
For those Anti-Microsoft guys out there, Don’t count me in. I repeat, Do not count me in. Anti-Microsoft sentiment has very less to do with my choice. I like Microsoft for what they did to the computer and software industry. I love them for their dream of placing a PC in every household and their aggressive chase of that dream, without which computers would still have been toys of scientists and professors. I respect them for their talent which gave us one of the most user friendly operating systems (I’m talking about pre-vista era, not after 
), the best office suite (even now), and the greatest IDE for programmers (Visual Studio) though limited to their proprietary .NET programming.
I switched to Linux because it’s open source, It’s speed, It doesn’t crash, Viruses are few and far between, Freedom, Open Standards, Lots of applications covering almost all the tasks done on windows but saving me thousands of dollars, Interoperability with Windows Networks and shares, and It’s great community relationship.
Most of all, it never shows the BSOD which I’m very dreadful about 
My first installation was Fedora 10. I loved it. It was stable and secure. Good on looks too. After running it for a week, I switched to Ubuntu 8.10 out of the curiosity of how would it be, being the most popular distro. And I didn’t switch back I would post my experiences on both of these distros in some later post.
So, here I am. On Ubuntu Linux. Stable. Secure. Rich. Happy
