Illender's Journal: Why Ubuntu is awesome and windows is not.

So I had this laptop running Window XP.
And it was buggy like a swamp.
All the time it was crashing. Almost unusable. This was my story with windows since I switched over from DOS to Win 3.1, on all those 5.25's, back in the day. So now here I am, still running windows, still hitting bugs.

So one day I'm surfing the net (do kids still say that?) and I decide to see what Linux is up to. My last run-in had been Red Hat, an early version that that my buddy, xenophon, had loaned me. That was so long ago I'm not sure why I went back to windows, but go back again. On second thought, it was probably the games. Yeah, definately the games.
Anyway,I digress. So I look up Linux, and I see this one, The Jaunty Jackalope, and I think "ooh, that sounds cool, it must be cool." So I go check it out, and dig this: they offer to send me the CD for free. Or I can download like 700mb or something. So I ordered the CD.

Well, 5-6 weeks go by and then one day the Ubuntu CD shows up. Cool! Well, having a family I don't have much time for experimenting, so onto a shelf it went.

So some more time goes by and I'm chugging along, got my laptop,and my little cell modem running through a pcmcia usb 2.0 card, thinking I was all sorts of cool. I could play Travian outside while the kid plays in the yard! How cool is that?
So here we are, 11pm on a saturday nite, fifteen raids on the way, negotiations in progress for my growing Alliance, and I go kiss the kid goodnight.
System file missing or corrupt.
What? That can't be right. Reboot.
System file missing or corrupt.
Aw, man. Gotta drag out all the disks.

1. Windows, check.
2. My games, check.
3. Disk for pcmcia card, check.
4. Disk for cell modem, oops.

Turns out it's 1200 miles away in my step-dads laptop. Well, that presents a problem, the provider is closed till monday. But I can still install windows. But no, the disk didn't survive the move. Do you know how hard it is to find windows xp without paying a hundred or more? I mean, c'mon?
Spend a few hours moping while I figure something out. But wait, what about that Ubuntu disk? I'll install that.

Turns out, Ubuntu doesn't need the pcmcia OR the cell modem disk. And games? Oh brother are there games out there. And, there are educational programs.
I'm actually running EdUbuntu now, and have several education programs for my 2 yr old, who is mastering the use of the mouse pad,and learning letters and numbers, thanks to 30-40 minutes a day with daddy on the computer.

Oh, and by the way, it's been two months, with me pushing hard, running 3-4 windows of opera with 10 tabs each, while doing the same with mozilla (those farms won't farm themselves ya know), and running an audio player, and an old version of scorched earth.
And it hasn't crashed once.