More Baby Steps

In a recent post, maybe my last one, I talked about how I'm trying to migrate to Linux Ubuntu as an operating system, hoping one day to actually leave Microsoft and it's Window's environment completely behind. I've now taken a few more baby steps in that direction. I've been using Linux Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on my third laptop to get used to it, and just the other day promoted it up to my No. 1 laptop! My Win 7 laptop has been demoted to second banana.

Now, as of this time, I'm not including my desktop PC in this, it's my gaming machine and will be the final one to make the transition someday. Which might not necessarily be that long from now. I found an open source screen recorder that I like very much and works well on my laptop with Ubuntu, and Steam has been working very well on it as well, I've even installed a game I've played before called "Grow Home", which ran quite nicely considering I was using an integrated graphics card for it on Ubuntu. So putting Ubuntu on my desktop is looking more and more likely.

Promoting the Ubuntu laptop up to my prime laptop will now mean it's getting used for much more and more often. I've even been able to watch both Netflix and Hulu on it, without having to jump through any hoops or use any command lines with the terminal to get them to work. Ubuntu is starting to feel more and more like something that I can just open up and use just as I would any other computer. I'll keep you posted on where I'm at in this transition and how well it goes either way.

Step 1 of weening myself off Microsoft!

Well, I've taken my first step at weening myself off of Microsoft. I've still got my laptop with Win 7 on it, and my desktop still has Win 8.1 on it. I have a second laptop though that I've installed Ubuntu on, I'm not sure right off hand which update version it is, but it's the newest out. I've tried a couple of different versions of Linux before in the past and had mixed results with them. The problem with Linux in my opinion is that it seems to be designed with geeks in mind that like to get in under the hood and mess with things. Some stuff you want to do, you end up having to search through a forum to find someone who explains how you have to open up a command line and type in a bunch of commands to get something to work. I'm not into programming and I just want to install something by clicking on it and it just works.

Ubuntu does seem to have a lot of things going for it though, most things work simply and easily, it's fast and light, and with Steam loaded on it, I can even play a lot of the games in my steam library on Linux! And as I understand it, Netflix is even supported on Linux now, so that's one of the final hurdles I've had that have kept me from switching permanently to Linux. I'm planning on using that laptop more and more and see if I can get used to it and eventually, pull the plug on Microsoft and get them out of my house!

A split house-hold...

About 3 months ago, our media-center PC became infected with the HORRIBLE Win7 trojan. If you're not familiar with it, count yourself lucky. It's one of those trojans that installs itself on your PC and tells you that you have fake viruses and that you need to purchase their product to clean your computer...the worst part being that they've emulated the look and feel of Microsoft Security Essentials which is what I use on my PC's. Basically if you've been infected with this trojan, YOU"LL NEVER GET RID OF IT! Everything I tried would not get rid of this thing off the computer, and my wife's laptop as well. We had to wipe both hard-drives and start from scratch. It worked fine on the laptop, but wouldn't you know, I ran into a few snags with the media-center pc. When I bought it originally it was a Vista computer. After Windows 7 came out, I'd upgraded it, but alas, I failed to make a clean boot disk. So when I tried to use the old, original boot disk I'd made for Vista, it wouldn't install, I just kept getting a corrupted data warning.

Well, I wasn't about to shell out money for a brand new install of Windows 7, so I decided to go the open source route and installed Ubuntu, a free version of Linux. All in all, I haven't been to upset about the change. It has a clean interface (the classic gui that is), and does pretty much everything my windows 7 pc does. The only 2 real complaints I have about it is, it doesn't support single-clicking (you have to double-click to open programs) and Netflix doesn't allow you to stream movies to it, because of Ubuntu being open-source I guess, and the software that Netflix uses for streaming is proprietary. You can watch Hulu though, and just about any other video site works as well. I've never tried, but I imagine I'd have trouble with my bank's website as well, and probably other sites where transactions are involved, not sure about that though. I've still got windows 7 on my laptop, but if they'd ever fix it where I could stream Netflix and do my online shopping through Ubuntu, I could see myself slipping the corporate leash for good and going freeware!