I bought a new machine and I decided to try to load Linux on it.
I downloaded Ubuntu. Burned an ISO. So far so good.
I'm not a total newbie - I understand the general principles, and I've built many a box for myself over the last 10 or so years, but I've never done Linux.
So I created my partitions and went for it. Ubuntu installed pretty easily I must say.
But my wireless card - which, according to the company had a Linux driver - didn't work.
So I did what anyone else would do - started googling, hit the ubuntu forums. I came across many an idea. I came across a couple of guys trying to build drivers. I tried a bunch of these ideas. I was in the terminal too, on the command line. (for the record I write a lot of php and sql, so I'm not unfamiliar with the command line).
Three hours later I'm no closer (at least it doesn't feel that way) than I started. And the only thought going through my head was that this is what it's going to be like when i get stuck.
I had to stop. I can't sink time into it like this.
Believe me, I'm not against Linux at all, and I don't want to start a holy war about it. I really wanted to use it. It's just that there's a
huge learning curve, whether it's real or perhaps even my own perception. My world doesn't require a whole lot of complexity, and to be honest I've got everything working quite nicely in XP. It never crashes on me and I'm highly productive in it. (Of course I'm not saying it's perfect either. Lord knows I'm not trying Vista for a long time.)
Good luck to you all. I'll keep tabs on how things are going here because I'm still interested. But I've got to go back...
