Today marks the release of the all new Ubuntu 11.04. And it marks a new OS experience for me: I’m actually moving from Windows to the Linux—after 12 years of happy Windows computing.
The past
Well, I got my first WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers) based PC on Christmas 1999 featuring Windows 98 as operating system. Before I grew up with an old 12MHz DOS based system (this PC actually had a weight of 20kg!). But back to my Windows PC: I really liked it. I kept it for almost 4 years, expanded the memory and hard drive; played games like Quake3, Medal of Honor or RTCW; and most importantly began to mess around with code: First some simple JavaScript stuff, after a while I also tried coding Winamp3 skins. From there on I tried lots of coding languages, tutorials and also got involved with interface design. The result was a set of Programs I really do not want to miss anymore. Here is an overview:
- Winamp — my first love
- Trillian
- Opera
- Adobe Photoshop
- Eclipse
- mp3Tag
The now
So all this was some time ago. In the meantime I enrolled at university, got some more insight to Linux, it’s terminal and open source software. Nevertheless I never dared to perform a full switch to a Linux based OS and stayed with a dual boot…
…Till today. The release of Ubuntu 11.04 and it’s totally revamped user interface have won me over! Actually the move was easier than I thought and I didn’t boot into Windows for at least two weeks :)
But what happened to my beloved programs? (Remark: This is written as a retrospective three months after my move to Ubuntu).
- Winamp — replaced by gmusicbrowser
- Trillian — runs via Wine. I know there is Empathy and Pidgin, but Trillian has so nice sync features with my Android phone. …
- Opera — runs natively :)
- Adobe Photoshop — As I own a valid license I first tried running it via Wine, but this did not work out too well. So I needed to take the bitter pill: Running it via VirtualBox with a slim Windows Server 2003. I know about GIMP - but Photoshop is just so much better ;)
- Eclipse — based on Java… so no problems running it with Linux.
- mp3Tag — PuddleTag
The future…
…will deffo be free of Windows as main operating system.