Windows has served me well, but like all good things its coming to an end. XP was a wonderful companion, unfortunately for MS while they rested on their laurels the rest of the open source world raced past.
Four years back I started playing with linux, without the thought ever crossing my mind that - I would be relying on it more that I rely on my Windows. And last year I bought a Dell laptop that came pre-installed with Win7X64. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) it came with a memory leak already on it.
After spending innumerable weekend hours over a one year period I turned to MS tech support to help me fix the issue. The guys did their best and I do appreciate their efforts, but there is only so much you can do remotely. As they say when one door closes another door opens. In my case when the 'window' closed on me, multiple flood gates of the open source world opened up.
Of course having friends with a solid linux background did help me understand a lot of things. One of the things I'm most grateful to them is they rarely fixed issues on my PC, they merely pointed the way. I understood so much more by learning and applying these directions.
Of course like all new comers I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of choices/distros available. I played with a few distros (quite a few to be honest) these include - Knoppix, SUSE, Lindows, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, PC-Linux (one of my favorites) & of course Mandriva.
I am currently running Kubuntu 11.04 and to be honest I'm more comfortable on this than Win7. See more here -
http://www.kubuntu.org/news/11.04-release
Another good review site -
http://linuxlibrary.org/index.php/distributions/kubuntu-11-04-review/
So that brought me to this question - what is the factor that would cause a loosely knit group of geographically widely distributed developers compete and overtake MS an OS monopolistic giant ? Where MS is funding, researching, sponsoring & paying salaries to good folks to develop an OS, there is a bunch of 'rebels' who refuse to conform to the flow but instead write an OS that has better eye candy, utilize lower system resources,be more stable, have less viruses & be available for free ? I think its
passion - apparently not something that money can buy. One license of Win is couple hundred dollars, one license of (K)Ubuntu priceless :)
Below a screenshot of my desktop (a mac theme),
A wise person told me that I should use the default skin that came with Kubuntu & not try to fake a Mac. But I disagree - they beauty of these themes is that they can be what you want your PC to be.
After all you don't own it, not unless you tweak it.
Credits - Niraj, Chetan, Vinay, Amod,Rakesh who helped me with Linux. Ritesh who inspired me to take up this journey 4.5 years back by showing off the cool eye candy, mostly refusing to fix issues on my pc instead showing me the way & being my critic every time I hopped a distro.
