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Lex V. Ross

Email: <lross AT SPAMFREE mail DOT ru>

In my MBA years, I switched to RPM based distributions of Linux after my hard drive crashed and I lost my 2 years work. Sure it was not all that perfect back then, but man, was it stable and solid as a rock! It gave me complete peace of mind not only with mirrored disks and daily backups allowing me to go back in time up to 2 years if I needed to. The realization came how paranoid and technical I used to be when dealing with Windows 95 on a daily basis. Being scared to press the wrong button at the wrong time so that particular application won't crash. And what it took me to troubleshoot different issues related purely to the computer itself and not to the nature of my work. Moving to Linux was like a liberation from being enslaved by the machine for such a long time. Interesting enough, as I believed in the past that only tech savvies and geeks would use Linux. Never looked back ever since.

As time went by, KDE came in with glossy, shiny and polished looks, configurable in any way one could imagine. So I turned my machine into Mac OS 7 kind of thing, and absolutely loved it. I am still using my 10 year old desktop with 2x20GB hard drives, and now with Ubuntu 7.10. I only had to add more RAM for Ubuntu, and it is now 384MB up from initial 256 megs. Yes, this desktop was top of the line back then.

One of the greatest things about Linux is that one can easily switch from one flavour to another with all settings preserved and documents still usable. I loved Ubuntu for its simplicity over KDE, which I was using before. With KDE, I spent too much time customizing things with ever changing personal preferences rather then doing things. Ubuntu offered less choice (actually, it is sooo boring!) and made me concentrate on my job, which is what I need.

As managing director, I now use Ubuntu on my desktop, and Vista on my Asus F5N laptop (with Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org). Installing Ubuntu on a laptop is a real pain, because there is no real standard for those things. I would really appreciate some assistance here.

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