Closing Windows and Opening My Eyes Part III - My year with Ubuntu Linux

It’s been over a year since I decided to make my switch to Ubuntu Linux. In the beginning it was tough. Sacrifices had to be made. Driver issues had to be dealt with and navigating through the file system was about as fun as an evening with my folks. But, for every new environment there is an adjustment period. People who switch from Windows to to Apple's OS X have a learning curve. Every change takes some getting used to. I found this to be not much harder than most. In fact, most of my biggest problems came from the fact that I built my system. If i would have purchased a pre-configured, ited machine from System76 or Dell I probably wouldn’t have suffered through most of my biggest issues, which were driver related.

This is a brief timeline of the last year

Week 1 – Slow going, but fun. The novelty was fresh and it was awesome! Basic tasks were obvious enough to me such as Firefox (I prefer Chrome so I installed that instead), LibreOffice, Software Center, etc... System settings were painful to hunt through and some common menu items had different names which just took a little getting used to. Troubleshooting my video driver issues proved near impossible and I can count at least a dozen gray beard hairs that showed up during this time.

Month 1 - Basic tasks and settings began to make more sense. My CLI familiarity had grown. I could decipher a good portion of the man pages as needed and I was starting to remember some common options for commands I was regularly using like find and apt-get. Confidence was high., though I was still using the Widows 7 installation on my laptop for everything work related and even for some typical stuff. I had some issues with full screen Flash videos on Hulu so I would watch on my laptop or my Roku.

Month 3 - My overall basic skills were improving and I was starting to recall the locations names of log files and was getting the hang of commands like "grep", "find", using aptitude, and starting to figure out some basic scripting. I went for my Linux+ certification tests for the first time. Confidence no longer as high...

Month 6 - I got into a good rhythm with trying new software and forgetting about it when it got tough to deal with. I have to confess, I was also going through a bit of a lazy slump, which also accounts for my lack of posts until now.

1 Year –  Every day that goes by there is less of a reason to use Windows at all. Even when I work from home, I use Remmina remote desktop client to connect to my office computer over a VPN, only to use our ticketing system. I have been able to find an alternative for everything else I need and more.  Things like a free lab environment where I can teach myself all the basic principles of computing I would have to pay for and learn on someone else's time.  It's made me better at my job.
More importantly though, an average user get just as much use with the same amount of effort as they put in now. At the three month level I was comfortable doing everything a typical user would do throughout the course of a day with their computer.  It took another 6 months to begin to feel like a low level “Power User” and after a year, I am just about as comfortable as I am in Windows XP or 7. The networking/security side of things is another story., but I am still learning.

Linux is everywhere. 94% of the world's supercomputers use Linux. Google's Android operating system is based on Linux and almost every other tech company out there uses it. Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Salesforce and loads of others run Linux on their servers. It is unmatched for security, stability  and flexibility. The community support is excellent for the major desktop distros like Ubuntu and Mint. I think anyone, with a little bit of time, can use Linux at home. Why don't you give it a try.