Ramblings

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Years and years ago I was friends with a really smart guy who kept plugging Linux.  He kept singing its praises but was really not winning anyone over with the DOS-like interface and all the command-line coding.

Given my recent decision to embrace my geekery and feeling rather confident I thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s try it’.  I chose Ubuntu purely since it’s the one everyone online seems to talk about the most.  Apparently it’s easy to install, yadda yadda, so I thought ‘That’s the one’.  Now, I don’t claim to be a rocket scientist (far from it), and indeed, I don’t have vast amounts of experience with the IT part of computing - I deal mostly with web and multimedia stuff - but I feel relatively competent.

So I stuck in the live disk, gave it a whirl, and then chose to install.  I got through the installation procedure and then came to the reboot.  At which point I got a bunch of I/O errors but it worked so I thought ‘meh’.  I had a fidget and started thinking ‘yeah, this is quite cool’…  Until it started declaring it didn’t have enough space.

I had absolutely no knowledge of partitioning - it was always billed as some kind of ‘here be monsters’ situation that I was to touch under no circumstances! Hence, I’d assumed that Linux would automagically use free space from my Windows partitions without any intrusion from me (the stupid human).

Soooo…I decided to wipe it and start again after I’d repartitioned enough space for it.  Wiping the partition and resetting the MBR proved interesting - I don’t have a Windows disk, I only have one of those stupid ‘restore to factory settings’ disks.  So I needed to download a program called MBRfix (which was an absolute life-saver) in order to get rid of GRUB (the screen that comes up inviting you to select which OS you want to boot into).

Anyways, after I’d repartitioned, reinstalled (with the same I/O error), yadda yadda.  I installed all the updates and approached the issue of getting my wifi card to work.  Now, this thing is an absolute pain in the arse - it barely works in Windows with all the proper drivers - so I wasn’t holding my breath.  I did manage to get it working through hunting down a forum for my specific laptop build.  But, this involved downloading and running someone else’s code.

Herein lies my first problem with Linux: how do I, as a relative lay-person, know that these helpful people aren’t including some malicious code in there?  I know, it’s safer than Windows but is that purely because less people use it?  My second issue is that I tried to browse the internet and could not get anything to work.  I installed about 5 plugins and yup, still, Flash didn’t work, mp3 playback in gmail didn’t work, etc etc.

I was back in Windows less than an hour into full use.  The support from people on Twitter and in forums is amazing, but I definitely wouldn’t say it’s anywhere near as easy to use/set-up as people make out.