After many months of procrastination, and playing with numerous LiveCDs, I've finally nuked Windows off my main desktop PC. It's now running a shiny new Ubuntu Linux. I'm pretty happy with it so far. I've even managed to get it talking with my network connected external hard drive, which required a bit of command line fiddling, but nothing too scary.

I'm very pleased at how many things just worked. For example it detected my network connect all-in-one printer/scanner, without having to install 40MB of HP driver bloat.

One thing that's made the transition much easier is the amount of Open Source software I was already using under Windows, so that in many cases I'm just switching from the Windows version to the Linux version of the same program.

I'm looking forward to learning more about it.

What fun!

Welcome to the club! I have to admit that I have bought two pieces of software for Linux: Alpha Centauri (the sequel to the turn based strategy game Civilisation by Sid Meier), and Bibble Pro (a nice raw photo manipulation suit - I used to use GIMP and dcraw, but found it too hard to repeat the same raw to jpg for consistent results).

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Let me add my congratulations! I don't use ubuntu flavour myself, but even so...

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I've been test driving a bunch of distros for a while, and at the moment Ubuntu is the one I feel most confident I can tame. I need something I feel in control of for my main PC.

It does have a bit more overhead than some of the others, though, so as my experience expands I'll certainly be keeping an eye on other distros. I'm tempted to try installing some in VirtualBox to see how they behave.

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Oh Virtualbox is great. I have windows installed in one just in case (I'm not very hardcore, I'm afraid), but I only ever had to use it once.

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Cool. I've been getting used to GIMP, and once you get over the fact that does things slightly differently to PhotoShop, it's quite powerful and pretty easy to use.

I don't have a decent enough camera to be dealing with RAW images, though, and if paying for software saves you time and stress, then it's money well spent.

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I was given an old laptop a while ago (can't remember the spec) had planned to put Ubuntu on it. You have reminded & inspired me to do it. Thank you :-)

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