Day 32

Neat - I made it. 30+ days with Kubuntu and still going strong.

I still have some minor niggles. The hacks I had to implement for some of the file sharing and network management; the issues with Firefox hogging the CPU and memory; occasional new weirdnesses that pop up now and then and have to be dealt with (by way of example, yesterday I tried to load a page with a Java plugin; ever try and install the JRE in linux? Yeah. Um. Good luck with that).

The eye-opener for me has been that niggles are a way of life when using computers. I've traded one set of niggles (Windows) for another set (Kubuntu). The niggle sets are not quantitatively different enough, however, to distinguish between the OSes based on how much I can get done in a fixed amount of time, on average. Given Kubuntu's free and open source nature, it therefore has a slight advantage, and now that I'm more used to it, it's what I'm going to use as my primary platform. Windows is always going to be around; living and working in a Windows world means every now and then you might just have to boot that partition up to get a critical job done, but I'm comfortable with a model that sees me doing 99% of my work in Kubuntu and an ever declining 1% in That Other OS.

I enjoyed this little adventure. I hope you did too. Try making the change - it's easier than you think ;-)