Almost a year ago, I was still dual-booting WinXP and Kubuntu. I wrote a post about how I didn’t have to switch back to Win except on rare occasion. I am happy to say that for probably 8 months or so I have not had Win on my machine. Websites display properly, email is great, Flash works, codecs are easily available, and I can say that keeping a separate /home partition makes upgrading or re-installing extremely simple.

To break all that down, I have no reason to use Win. Well, I didn’t have a reason until I enrolled in school. 99.9% of my coursework is done on Win machines at college. Don’t get me wrong, it is a decent operating system with a wide array of options for its use. The main point that saddens me is how an institution of higher learning can so blindly promote the Win monopoly. Yes, they are the most widely used OS, but at least touch on *nix a little bit.

Back to my point, over at least the past 8 months I have lived a Win-free life. Even Em and the kids are using Linux. The kids mostly play on PBS.org or watch America’s Funniest Home Videos. Em mostly uses the net and reads email. Very little has come up that the OS could not accomplish. Heck, I can’t think of anything it hasn’t done that I’ve needed. The only issues I have had are from adding eye-candy (pretty desktop effects) that are still not ready for production use. Those problems were my own fault, not Linux’s issue.

With those issues, it was very nice to have a /home partition that kept all of my settings, files, etc. separate from the operating system. On Win you would have to track down where all of your files are stored and hope you got them backed up on CD, DVD, external HDD, etc. With Linux all of those things are saved to your own personal directory called /home. When you re-install for whatever reason (upgrade, meltdown, etc.) you just mark that partition as /home during setup, don’t format it, and your settings are sitting there waiting when you boot. This has been a real life-saver for me.

For the life of me, I don’t understand why users go pay $500 minimum to go get a new PC with Vista or XP when they could just load Linux for free and keep money in their pocket. I guess it could be fear of a new environment, lack of knowledge, or some other odd reason.

I hope it gets figured out and a solution provided. As for me, I’ll put Win on a portable HDD as required for class and keep using my 2 Kubuntu computers with free upgrades while everyone else keeps paying M$ so that they will keep putting out barely-improved operating systems.