Amazingly, I went more than two whole months using only Ubuntu at home since one of my RAM sticks got busted and Windows refused to boot. Luckily, I have a dual boot computer, with Ubuntu as my alternative OS.
Ubuntu is pretty awesome. As a Windows replacement, it does most of the things you need without much problem. It has two distinct advantages over Windows:
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The Debian package distribution mechanism is just great. Virtually everything you need is provided and can be installed easily. In Windows, every single program decides how it wants to be installed.
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The customizability of the UI. I’m pretty sure this one rates a lot higher for geeky fellows than ordinary folk though.
However, there’s something that makes it really difficult for me to go pure Ubuntu permanently: gaming. Wine/Cedega is a pretty lame substitute. And with the Future Sight online release coming up, I decided I needed to have access to Magic Online again, so I got hold of an XP installer and tried to fix my XP install.
The freaking XP installer wiped my partition table.
After running the XP installer just to see what options I had for repairing the previous Windows installation, I found that the Grub bootloader wouldn’t work anymore, my PC refused to boot at all. I lost some 60GB of downloaded data that day. (I was able to recover some 4GB of personal data… pictures and such.) Up to now I’m still wondering if the XP installer saw that I had a different OS installed and just had a “Oh yeah? It’s me or nothing!” tendency.
In any case, I’m on a clean XP install now. I’ll probably reinstall Ubuntu some time (dual boot again), but for now I seem to be another Microsoft sheep again.
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