My mom has been happily running Ubuntu on her desktop for years. She never complains, it just works. She has a little netbook that runs Windows, and I'm always getting support calls about that machine, but I never get a single call about her Ubuntu PC.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about how I salvage PCs that start choking on the weight of Windows. I install Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system. I've done just that a lot this week.
It started when the family desktop suffered a hardware failure. It's been running Windows XP since XP was new, so I tried to save it by installing Ubuntu. I also got my grubby mitts on a couple of old laptops that were fit for the pit, and managed to save one with Ubuntu 8.10. Note: When it runs slow with Ubuntu 10.10, try 8.10 which requires far fewer horses under the hood.
Today, I decided to bite the bullet and actually bought my first new desktop in almost a decade. For $250 I got a fancy new case with an AMD Athlon II X2 245 processor, 2 GB of DDR2 800 memory and a 500 GB hard drive. I brought it home and installed Ubuntu 10.10 and it's super fast and delightfully stable.
Truth be known, I thought Ubuntu 9 was pretty ugly, but Ubuntu 10 looks fantastic. As more and more of our daily computer tasks move to the browser, you have to ask yourself why you'd want to pay for a Windows license when it's just more fun in Ubuntu... not to mention free.
I'm sticking with Ubuntu... at least until the Google O/S gets released and I give that a whirl.
