November of last year, I set out to build a new pc for a business I wanted to start. I knew exactly what hardware I wanted and how it was going to work together, but the one thing I didn't put much thought into was the OS. Once I was done constructing this impressive machine, I was in no position to purchase a copy of XP, or worse yet, Vista with its multi-hundred dollar price tag (not to mention the cost of Microsoft Office which is about twice the cost of Vista). So, it was suggested by my good friend that I give Linux a try – I must admit that this both intrigued and scared me a little. But one thing was certain, I needed a change.

A flurry of questions quickly came over me. Such as will I still be able to use photoshop? How will I design webpages? And how will I go about my daily tasks? These were fundamental concerns to me at the time, and it was these questions that dominated my thoughts, as I watched the torrent download to my windows hard drive.

But I quickly realized that there are far better linux programs that do the same job, are free, and work better. For example, Firefox and Thunderbird have a native linux install; GIMP is like a version of photoshop but with more features; Bluefish is an amazingly fast HTML editor; Pidgin is an IM program that includes everything (even GoogleTalk); Open Office beats Microsoft Office in every way, and I can save in the .doc format. What can I say? I found a program for every need I had. They were all 64-bit  as well unlike the windows versions. I had more speed, more reliability, and more productivity than ever before.

The install at the time was Fedora 6, which went very well and was even perhaps easier to install than windows. At the time I was amazed at how many programs were 100% free. All I had to do was click on Add/Remove programs and type in a keyword, and I found the program I needed. It was simply amazing. I also can't forget to mention how much faster everything loaded and how well everything worked in Linux. There was no more waiting around like I did in windows – it just worked, and it worked well.

Some things took a little extra effort than I had expected, such as installing my video driver “kmod-nvidia” and compiling Mplayer so I could play any video format. But I have to say, anyone could do it, and unlike windows, you will only have to do this once.

Gone are the days of reinstalling my OS to clean up all the gunk. Gone are the days of disk fragmentation and the blue screen of death, and gone are the days where programs crashed: malware and spyware simply can not exist in a linux environment with SELinux enabled.

I urge you to give linux a try, once you do I know you will be hooked for life.

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