jake olsen

I switched to Ubuntu on my laptop, leaving Windows and passing OSX.

My first experience with Linux was in 1997 when I was managing a Windows NT network and wanted to move DHCP off my servers (DHCP and WINS were flaky as hell). Routers were not a commodity at that time, so I took an old 486, loaded Red Hat, setup IPCHAINS and masquerading, and had a DSL connection shared throughout the office in a couple of hours. The last time I tried to run Linux at home was in 2002 with Mandrake, now Mandriva, which worked for about a month, then I realized I actually needed to work (and occasionally game) and not spend so much time tinkering.

Ubuntu has a pretty slick installation, rivals Windows with only ONE massive software update post-install. Synaptic and apt are great for installing/removing software, and the feeling I get for support open source software is pretty good.

I tried AIXGL & Compiz (video here), but it was way too slow on the poor Intel chipset.

Connecting to WPA2 was a pain in the ass until I realized network-manager (nm-applet) helped with this.

We’ll see how much I miss Windows, so far, so good, but my laptop is not my main development machine.

–jake