= best decision I've made.

amy

Well I had always wondered about Linux. I had heard friends talk about it, and I had dabbled in it sort of unknowingly when I softmodded my original Xbox, but back then it didn't really occur to me that I could use it as my primary operating system on my desktop. Fast forward to early May of this year, when I noticed a friend on another forum showing screenshots of an OS I hadn't seen. Turns out it was . It was summertime, I was bored..so I said quot;What the heck? Why not.quot; and went ahead and burned the iso. Originally I had planned to install it just to see what the fuss was about, and stick with Windows because in all actuality the only true complaints I had about Windows were 1. IT'S SO SLOW UNDER A LOAD and 2. While, yes, you can get cool themes via WindowBlinds, that just makes it even slower. But other than that my XP installation ran smoothly.

So I installed  to dual boot, and it went off without a hitch. I was extremely impressed with the whole LiveCD idea, as I had never heard of such a thing in Windows. I started playing around in , dabbled a bit in Terminal but at the time I didn't really grasp compiling, and it seemed a lot of the things I was running into (i.e. pidgin, pidgin-rhytmbox plugin, etc.) needed to be compiled. That frustrated me. Then, I go to load up my rhythmbox library with my iTunes music folder from Windows..only to run into about 400 import errors. So basically I said quot;Screw this.quot; and wiped  and went back to Windows.

Fast forward another 2 weeks to about mid-May. I got bored one night and decided to reinstall . Everything goes even better this time, I've learned gparted and how to use my Rescue CD, so I'm good to go. I install it, but this time when I run into problems I use the trusty forum search feature. My major concern with  was my music library problem, because that's one of the major elements I used in Windows. I found the Multimedia plugins post in the Beginner's Forum and went on to import my library again. This time every song loaded with the exception of the songs that were purchased from ITunes..this made me very happy, because that was only about 80 songs of 1100. Then I realized rhythmbox had a last.fm plugin..even better. So at this point I'm feeling pretty good.

So my next concern was learning how to compile. I went in and started messing around, and still kept getting errors. So, I asked a friend and he told me it worked for him. I went back and then realized the errors I were seeing were actually dependencies that I needed. So each time an error came up, I installed the dependency using Synaptic and finally got my installs to go off just fine. Now after several installs I feel fairly confident I can install most anything I need to in .

After getting my system to where I wanted it, my little brother asked me to install it on his computer. I told him I would as long as he would come to me if something went wrong and wouldn't try to fix it himself. It took me 2 days, but after many forum searches I got his laptop to boot  without any problems. His sound wouldn't work, so I added quot;acpi=offquot; to his menu.lst file. This fixed the sound, but killed his wireless. I couldn't figure out why his wireless was dead after it had been working all that time, and it still worked in the Live CD. So I was sitting trying to figure out why it was doing that when it hit me..I had seen a post on the forums that had mentiones quot;acpi=offquot; might fix your sound problem, but it will kill all other laptop features. So I went back in and edited that out, and sure enough..wireless was back..but somehow, so was his sound! I went into alsamixer and turned up his sound and now everything is fully functional. He hasn't had a single issue, and neither have I.

So Friday I took the leap of faith..I felt I had everything I could ever need in my  install and decided to nuke my Windows install..so now I'm totally Linux. No more slow Windows.

Since then I have installed Fedora and Gentoo. Fedora was sluggish and I couldn't get my display to configure right..it was doing the same thing that  did before my Nvidia restricted driver kicked in. I wiped it. Then I had a horrible time trying to get my GRUB reconfigured to boot into . I finally accomplished that (with help from the forums). Then I installed Gentoo, and actually did the base Gentoo install correctly via the text-based installer..but me being the Linux nub I am..I didn't know the command line was a quot;basic Gentoo installquot;. So I wiped it. My first impression of Gentoo is it's extremely difficult to learn/use..which I picked up from various stories on the internet. I have it on a disc so I do plan to mess with it again, just not right now.

Basically I couldn't be happier with my decision to switch.. is awesome and it has truly lived up to its claim of quot;It Just Worksquot; for me..

And by the way, I'm using Feisty.

I had close to the same experience when I first started.

Welcome.

Welcome! I was originally planning on trying out a few Linux distros for fun, but my first try was with , and I was so impressed by the ease of installation and use, the huge amount of easily-accessible software, and the HUGE  community out there, I have made it my main OS. I still plan to try some of these other distros for fun some time, but won't waste much time on them.  has turned out to be much more than just some fun hours of geeking and hard-earned frustration, and has fast become my Windows replacement. Any hassles I come across, that huge community is ready to answer them (though most of the time the answers are already in the forums and quickly found in Google searches). Once hardware manufacturers start supporting Linux more,  will be even more awesome (still have to go into Windows to tape a weekly radio show as my TV-FM card isn't recognised, dammit).