I’m not married, but I am aware of the traditional wedding vows, the vows that say "for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish," and on.  Now, getting married is probably the most important commitment anyone can make in their lives and, despite the statistics, I see more successful marriages than failures.  This leads me to one clear and obvious thought:  With so many people capably committing to spending their lives with another, why is everyone still using Windows?

Most people, afraid of the open source software commitment, simply use the OS that comes on their computers, which is probably Windows.  They may use Firefox or some other open source software, which is akin to dating open source, but until you boot the Ubuntu live CD and ceremonially repartition your hard drive to install Linux, you haven’t committed.

Committing to OSS used to be much harder than getting married.  In the olden days it would take a village  (Linux, btw, comes with a huge village known as the OSS community) just to get the NIC working.  But that was before Ubuntu.  With Ubuntu Linux, in many ways more so than in Windows Vista, things just work.  Sure, Linux might take some getting used to in the beginning, but once you’ve adjusted to your new partner, you’ll find that poorer and sickness just don’t happen as much as they did before you got hitched.

Here’s a short list of some vital open source software that you’ll be using as your relationship with OSS progresses.  Most of these can actually be installed on Windows if you still just want to date:  Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird of course; OpenOffice.org, an excellent alternative to Word; VLC, a swiss-army-knife-like movie player; GIMP instead of Photoshop; Inkscape instead of Illustrator; ClamAV for your anti-virus, and many other OS tools such as gThumb, Xine, and gEdit which come with most desktop distros running Gnome.

So install it already.  Take the plunge.  Use one of the friendlier distros, like Ubuntu.  This is an excellent chance to breathe life into your old laptop.  The very latest, cutting-edge hardware might be problematic at first (for example, at the time of writing, the Thinkpad T60 seems to work better than the T61 with the latest Ubuntu release).  Also, use one of the graphical package management tools, such as Synaptic on Ubuntu, to install all your software.  Synaptic is the precursor to that wonderful bit of nano-tech pie-in-the-sky invention, the feed, where you type in some parameters and exactly what you want appears before you.

And that’s what it’s about — getting exactly what you want, for free, and in the process supporting a community of minds that are rethinking everything and openly sharing these thoughts.  It feels good, not like a commitment at all really, more like liberation.  So free yourself.  Commit to open source software.

Posted in Uncategorized by Brian Ballantine | on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 8:14 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.