Void's Forums

One night about two years ago, I was surfing the WINAMP com forums where I came upon a thread that was called "PALLADIUM: The end of Privacy" What I read disturbed and sickened me enough that I emailed Microsoft that very evening:

"Just found out about Palladium, and I'm switching to Linux. Thank you and goodnight."


That was the beginning. Learning to run Linux has been a challenge for me, I'm not a geek by nature (well, not a COMPUTER geek anyway) and I don't like to read the fabulous manual. Whenever I look at the page, it seems that what I'm reading is completely basic and obvious, so I check another page and I'm completely lost. The only solution is to read the entire eleven hundred page muther focker-- sorry, not in this life.

Fortunately, I've grown comfortable living at my own personal bleeding edge. A big part of it is that I'm not married to my data-- until I get to point the where I can get one Linux version to do everything I want it to, I am perfectly happy to reinstall and reinstall and reinstall. (This has cut significantly into my illegal song downloading time. The RIAA would be pleased.) It means I can try anything, cause I can always wipe it and try again. It also means that I'm not sure where I am on the road from Newbie to guru. I know how to install and run five seperate distros; I have installed 3 distros together on this hard drive, and recently I upgraded and installed a new kernel... and it worked, though not perfectly... but I still need windows to burn my CDs.




I'm now running Linux about about 75 percent of the time. Independence from Microsoft is still the number one reason why I run Linux, but there are other reasons, such as: HELL YES, IT'S FUN! You get to the point where you don't know what you'd do without a nasty tech problem to solve. Fortunatly, I'm a long way from having to worry about that.. Right now much of my life revolves around the fact that the distro I prefer (Debian) uses an out-of-date kernel that doesn't support my soundcard or ALSA.. In typical Linux fashion, there's more than one solution. Do I keep trying to install a new kernel? Do I get a new soundcard? Do I try the unstable version of Debian? Or maybe I can keep trying distros? The beauty part is that sooner or later, this problem WILL resolve itself. Not only is the software getting smarter at an astonishing rate, but thanks to Linux, so am I!

Part of it is aesthetic. True Linux Geeks are supposed to shun X, but I think those GUI interfaces are beautiful, turly elegant next to WIndows. And I love the X Screensavers! Windows, even XP always seems drab by comparison. I love the choice of desktops, browsers, and office applications. Windows comes with one browser. Most Linux distros come with at least three, four if you count lynx.

I could go on. On my income it's either run Linux or run pirated software, and I don't like to break the law unless I have to. Linux will complete the job of bringing computers to the masses that Windows began. I love being a part of that. Friends who have been listening to me rave about Linux are starting to take notice.

And to think I owe it all to Palladium!

Glad to have you on the "good side"! :) Yeah, Palladium, lock-in, licensing, activation, spyware, etc are some of the many reasons I see people flocking away from Microsoft. It has always been purely technical and would use Linux even if all of the previous things weren't a consideration. I have grown to hate Microsoft though because of their not being able to play well with others. With them it's either all or nothing.

As far as your Debian goes, I have always used the unstable branch with no problems (or minor problems if any). And what sort of CD burning do you do that can't be done in Linux? I find Linux to be superior for most burning tasks.

Again, glad to see you made it from the dark side!

No, it's not that it can't be done... it's that I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO IT!

BTW, Just snagged a set of SuSE 9.0 CDS on EBAY... maybe that will resolve some of my problems. I'm especially interested in SuSE cause I've started saving my pennies for a PC with SuSE preinstalled from WalMart.com.

my flatmates still run all the windows xp, media player, internet exploder etc, and i often hearthings i had totally forgotten about. like on their windows 98 machine, they have some movies they CAN'T play! why? because it is impossible to upgrade windows media player beyond a certain point without buying a copy of windows xp to run it on! and without the newer version, newer codecs don't work. well, i won't be having that kind of fun again, because i won't agree to this.