At long last, after 5 years of thinking about it and 2 years of actually doing it, my migration to Linux is complete. The last step was to get my Palm handheld device (a Samsung i500 cell phone with integrated Palm capability, with a core group of rabid fans) syncing with the desktop machine, and I got that working in the past week.
Since 1998 I'd been running Windows 95 on a 350 MHz Pentium. Six years later it was barely hanging in there but working. In 2004 I started researching hardware and Linux distributions, having decided that Win95 was going to be my first and last foray into the wild world of Windows (prior to Win95 I was running OS/2 and DOS before that).
By December 2004 I had decided on and bought the hardware for the computer and was testing out Ubuntu Linux on it. Ubuntu Linux is perfect for me because of two critical design decisions: 1) they use the Debian platform, and 2) they standardized on Gnome instead of KDE. Linux folks will know what that means, and I'm not saying the alternatives are inferior, but it's what I decided I needed to see in a distribution. As a result I was looking at Libranet for a while, but they were a really tiny operation with limited resources, and in 2004 Ubuntu popped up with exactly what I was looking for.
So, for pretty much all of 2005 I had Ubuntu running on the new computer, but it was banished to the floor under my desk and the Windows machine remained my primary machine. I was waiting for Ubuntu to mature, and for me to have the time to tackle the huge disruption to my workflow that this migration would be. Over the 2005/2006 New Years holiday I tackled the conversion and had migrated pretty much everything over to the new Linux machine by mid-January 2006, in particular my email. All that remained on the Windows machine was the Palm Desktop application, because there weren't any Palm sync/desktop applications available in Linux that satisfied me. In April June 2006 Ubuntu came out with their 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) release and I upgraded the machine to it (that was a real nail-biter, I normally don't do OS upgrades ever, but my data survived it).
Palm sync still didn't work, so I was stuck with keeping the Windows machine running solely so that I could support the Palm. FYI, I live by my Palm device -- everything I know is in there. So I used VNC and a KVM to maintain quick access to the Windows machine.
And there it stayed until this week. Since Oct 2006 I've been occupied with a family matter (discussed occasionally here) and so there was no way I was going to tackle moving this along. A few weeks ago I decided that I had a window of opportunity in early August to give it another shot. I'd also thought up a way to get around the sync problem. Last weekend I tried it and it worked. It worked!
So for the past week I've been trying out these new shoes and they fit well enough. I got the last of the Palm data (encrypted account passwords) transfered over to the Linux platform yesterday, and late last night I shut down the Windows computer. If nothing bubbles up by Wednesday, then it's going in the basement and at long last we will have foot room under the desk!
Why Linux instead of Windows? I really have no patience for the crap that Microsoft pulls every time they release a new version of Windows, or even a "security update". Applications suddenly work differently, multimedia functions break, file association get stolen by MS products, and so forth ad nauseum.
In a free / open source environment, I don't have to worry about losing capabilities. For example, I have been tracking my finances since 1987 with the exact same Lotus 1-2-3 software package, first on DOS and then on OS/2. I see no compelling reason to migrate and have lots of reasons NOT to migrate (macros, menu familiarity, etc.) Windows dropped support for running DOS applications starting with XP (I think, might be 2K). On Linux, I spent 30 minutes dorking around with DosBox and now can run 1-2-3 just fine.
Firefox is great. Thunderbird (for email) is just OK, but is vastly configurable and expandable and certainly will continue to improve. VPN connections into work go smoothly. Security updates are exactly that: updates necessary to maintain the security of the machine, and nothing else. Multimedia can be a pain, but honestly I don't care that much about it. Flash 9 finally works on Linux and that right there takes care of a lot.
In fact, that brings up the biggest problem with Ubuntu. Since they made the early design decision to only include completely free software in their basic distribution, that means that they can not include codecs for popular proprietary media formats. So the basic Ubuntu installation can not play mp3 audio, play Quicktime movies, play Window Media files, et cetera. You have to figure out how to add those things, and the process has been frankly ugly for me. Two add-on systems have popped up to try to address this: EasyUbuntu and Automatix. I did not use either of these when building my system, because they frankly scare me, and in fact this analysis of Automatix appears to confirm my fears. Hopefully by the time I get to doing the spring update, Ubuntu will have made this process a lot smoother.
Now I'm looking forward to Ubuntu's next LTS update, version 8.04 in April 2008, when I'll do a complete upgrade of the system (keep the /home partition and wipe/reinstall everything else). In that process I hope to clean up a lot of the multimedia crud that I've kludged together over the past two years just to get it minimally functional.
Nearly 3 years after buying the hardware and installing the software for the first time, and 9 years after I bought the Windows computer, it's finally going into the basement. Hooray!