I started using Ubuntu three years ago, pushed to it by the advent of Windows Vista and Microsoft’s stated intention to force all Windows users to it. It was quite an effort to switch at that point, but it was a lot easier than it had been even a year earlier. And with every new version, I’ve watched it get better and easier. Several of my non-geek friends use it now too, at least part time. My sister-in-law asked me to put it on their family computer, after she literally watched a piece of malware (let in by one of her daughters, who wouldn’t stop downloading and installing things) steal her IM password. Even my mother-in-law uses it when she does her online banking.
Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and one of the founders and editors of Boing Boing, switched to it about six months earlier than I did. He’s been promising a write-up about his adventures ever since, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that he finally got around to anything like it. The reason?
I know I once promised to document my Ubuntu Linux changeover in detail, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. To be honest, there just wasn’t much to write about. I bought a ThinkPad (currently using the X200, lusting after the X201), downloaded and burned a CD, stuck it in the drive, turned it on, clicked “Install.” […] Since then, it’s Just Worked.
I’ve had a lot more problems than that, but most of them were caused by me pushing the envelope, trying to do things that the OS just wasn’t designed for, like on-the-fly drive encryption (which is now built in!). With the exception of some hardware problems on my mother-in-law’s machine (caused by repeated brownouts and, more recently, a lightning strike), I’ve seen pretty much zero problems for anyone else.
As he says, it Just Works. It’s good enough now for pretty much anyone to use, and is getting better with every release. Its share of the market is still minuscule, but it’s on a pretty strong growth curve. It wouldn’t take much to convince a lot more people and companies to switch to it — a fact that Microsoft seems painfully aware of, and scared enough to pee its collective pants over. And that’s a good thing for the rest of us.
Now we just need someone to do the same to another tech company that’s gotten a little too arrogant recently, symbolized by a piece of half-eaten fruit… 😉
Why the capital J and W in “Just Works”? I almost expect a tiny TM after it.
In deliberate imitation of Cory Doctorow’s “it Just Worked,” which I believe is a deliberate imitation of an old Apple ad campaign.
I’ve thought of booting Linux here (on my desktop, my netbook, and phone, already run it) instead of running it in a VM, and trying to make it my primary Unix desktop instead of OS X.
The only problem is not all of my hardware, namely my wifi, are supported by it, and it may be tricky, or expensive, to get a wifi adapter that works on OS X, Windows, and Linux. (That first one is hard to find, because most Macs have come with wifi built-in, even the desktops, for years now.) So I pretty much am stuck with running it in a VM. I am happy though with the level of security of OS X, if you really lock it down by running IronFox+NoScript, most OS X malware can’t make it through the defenses even if it’s out there probably; ’cause it goes after plug-ins or unsandboxed Firefox or worse yet Safari. (Which although it’s hardened by Apple on 64 bit hardware, has so many features, especially PDF reading, and a lack of NoScript control over JS that make it an accident waiting to happen for any malware that could be out there.)
Your wifi troubles are surprising, I don’t know of many that aren’t supported by Linux already.
Running Linux in a VM isn’t a major problem. I’ve been doing it for almost a year now, after running it as my primary OS for a couple years, and the only thing I miss is the Compiz compositing stuff (which I don’t really have any need for anyway).
My wireless-N Rosewill is supported by OS X, not by Linux. A number of wifi chipsets have no open-source drivers, Linux only supports a few of them, and the overlap with OS X I’m not sure of at all, as OS X only supports two chipsets that I know of. (But I could be wrong on that, at any rate, Macs only come with two different wifi chipsets historically.)
Should say two different wifi chipset “families”, they of course used the wireless-G and N variants of one of them.
Looks like that’s a Linux pain-point, which means that someone will come up with a solution eventually.
The problem is, many of these chipset companies provide no specs to the public.
Apparently government regs encourage them not to allow the general public to be able to do things like add channels not available in other countries, so if they don’t provide drivers for Linux (often closed source, most of the wifi drivers in the Linux kernel, especially on Ubuntu, are) they just don’t get written easily.
OpenBSD reverse-engineers some of them, but it’s not an easy job.
Where there’s a will, there’s a probate lawyer… oh, sorry, wrong saying. 😉