I knew I switched sometime in June 2009, so I dug into some log files today and discovered that it was a year ago today that I switched to Ubuntu. w00t! I can’t say that I miss Windows at all. The only time I have had to boot into Windows on this machine was to diagnose exactly which piece of hardware was causing the machine to randomly hang by swapping each out one at a time. (it turned out to be the DVD-ROM, which had been misbehaving for a long time)
The switch itself was pretty seamless. I could access all of my NTFS drives, both internal and external ones, my mobile broadband USB modem worked immediately as did my Wacom tablet. Even my ancient scanner worked as soon as I plugged it in, the same which could not be said with XP or Vista. For that, the manufacturer wanted to sell me the updated drivers. Software-wise, I have everything a web developer/designer/automated QA engineer/whatevertheheckIam needs: GIMP, Inkscape, vi, Firefox. I could install MySQL and Apache without it seeming like some bastardized unholy union. w00t x2!
That isn’t to say that I’ve been completely Windows free the past year. My work laptop is a Mac with three guest instances of XP for QA purposes. Even then, I spend most of my time on that machine at the command prompt – the Selenium server is the one that gets to muck around with the fancy GUI and the VMs. My personal laptop is still 64-bit Vista partly for non-work QA purposes, partly as a games console, and partly just in case I get the full screening again by the TSA. I suspect a security checkpoint isn’t exactly the best place to preach the virtues of FOSS… I have resorted to using Wine when there’s a piece of software I’d like to use that lacks a Linux version (would it kill you to have one, Evernote?) but it’s rare that I cannot find a suitable alternative.
Has switching made me more productive with my various personal projects, one of the primary reasons for the switch? Er, um, well, y’see, it’s like this… not really. But that has less to do with OS and more to do with work & family and overall motivation for and interest in said projects. Do I find my day-to-day use of this machine less aggravating and more enjoyable? A thousand times yes, and that is reason enough in and of itself.
