How I met Linux.

For those of you who didn’t know , there are more fish out there in the sea other than Windows and Mac. As a person who started the romance with computers with Windows 95, I was brought up in the ‘Windows’ school of thought.. Bill Gates was the ‘genius’ in my childhood textbooks.. Enter college , in comes the next ‘genius’ ( Apple Genius?) Steve Jobs… I still see people who think Steve Jobs was a legendary innovator who came up with many million-dollar ideas. Yes, Jobs is partly responsible for most of the everyday virtual stuff that we take for granted.. The original Unix-based pretty GUI Macintosh , the responsible-for-saying-goodbye-to-walkman-forever iPod, the first easy-to-use-without-looking-like-a-monkey-poking-a-stylus touch screen etc… But What the Steve Jobs actually excelled in, is identifying the usability and accessibility of pre-existing software/hardware , packaging them into a neat stable and pretty package and bringing it to the masses as a premium product. He was more a Marketing Genius rather than a Technical one.. Same goes with Bill Gates who could be called a business genius. Gates showcased Windows as a productivity powerhouse which attracted the business/corporate world. Windows’s stability and resourcefulness are the key reasons for its phenomenal success.

This is still my favorite loading screen

I still remember how awesome I thought the Windows 98 was (compared to Windows 95).. I used to connect to my crappy old Dial-up Internet just to download more Desktop Themes.

Dressing up her Naked beauty every other day

Why Linux?

Like I said I started with an outdated Windows 95, switched to customizable 98 as soon as I got hold of a Copy of it. Due to limited hardware resources ( had a Pentium 1st generation back then with just 32 MB RAM and a 1 GB Hard Disk) , I had to stick with Windows 98 for almost 6 years.

I used to be jealous of my School Lab as they had Windows XP. At that time , it was a sexy looking Operating system.. I was running out of themes to choose from, in my Win 98 system. So it was love at first sight on seeing that blue Aqua theme with large fonts and bright and functional windows.

In 2006 , I got a new rig and finally got the chance to literally feel and touch and own XP. But within a few months came out Microsoft’s long-awaited Windows Vista. I was already coming across the ‘Longhorn’ flavor in some of my friends’ computers.

So I jumped on the Vista wagon like every other unsuspecting user and bang!, I was met with a slow and not much resourceful black devil which I just couldn’t let go( as I have already bragged to my friends that I was having the latest and greatest Vista)…

This is when I started browsing through alternative Operating systems.. After a failed attempt at installing Hackintosh, I came across the words ‘Open-Source’.. I started thinking , how could something be totally free and still be good? So I decided to test out the most famous Linux Distro back then( and even now ) Canonical’s “Ubuntu”.. I went ahead and ordered a free copy of the Ubuntu Disc .. Got shipped in less than 2 weeks.