Jumping out of Windows

A while ago I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop (thereby bringing an antique back to life). This past weekend, I wiped out Windows XP and installed Ubuntu on our family desktop computer. So with five computers in our family, the score is now Windows XP 3, Ubuntu 2. Our absolute reliance on Windows has come to an end.

The care and feeding of our family's computers has always fallen to me, and over the past six or seven years I've reinstalled Windows 98 and XP on various computers at least six or seven times. No matter how careful we are, problems, mysterious, impossible ones, appear. That's what happened this past weekend — bewildering freezes that could only be undone by disabling our wireless connection. Our arsenal of anti-malware, anti-spyware, and anti-virus programs could find nothing wrong; restoring the system with ERUNT was no help. The only way to resolve this problem was to reinstall Windows. That would have meant getting all of SP2 (an endless download), patching XP to allow a custom theme, reinstalling dozens of programs, tweaking all sorts of settings — in short, giving up a day or more to bring the computer back from the dead. And for what? I'd likely be doing it all again a year or so from now. So with my family's blessing, I went for Ubuntu.

Switching was simple. Wiping the hard drive and installing Ubuntu (from one CD) took about thirty minutes. (The installation includes Firefox, the GIMP, OpenOffice.org, and other programs.) As with the old laptop, establishing the wireless connection was a simple matter, and the system recognized and installed our printer in less than fifteen seconds. Updating Ubuntu and adding some programs from online "repositories" was quite straightforward and also took very little time.

Is everything perfect? No. The major problem thus far is that Suspend and Hibernate don't work, so all we can do is leave the computer running or shut it off. Ubuntu starts up and shuts down very quickly, so even this problem doesn't seem crucial. (It's widespread, so I hope that it will be solved with an update). I miss the backup service Mozy, though the Firefox extension Gmail Space gives us free online storage via a Gmail account (alas without automation). I'd like to have a program similar to AllChars, so that I can add em dashes in text files and type, say, /link and have the appropriate HTML for a link appear. (I would think that such a program must exist, but I haven't found it.) And there are various small issues that should get resolved as I learn more about Ubuntu. There is, yes, a learning curve, at least for the person who's maintaining the computer. I need to learn, for instance, about the advantages or disadvantages of partitioning our hard drive (I know how to partition; I just don't know whether it's appropriate to do so). The Ubuntu forums, easily searched, have already provided answers for many questions.

I suspect that as everyday computer users think carefully about the costs and complications of "upgrading" to Windows Vista and Office 2007 (both hideous, from the many screenshots I've seen), Ubuntu will become increasingly popular. I'd go so far as to predict a near-future in which many households are running at least one computer with a free operating system. It's relatively easy to jump out of Windows and land on your feet.

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