Brian Hurt <bhurt at spnz.org> wrote: > Generally attempts to go cold turkey don't work. For souls of lesser mettle, perhaps! :-) I don't want to sound like the wizened old Linux god, but I am. No, wait. That's another person. Anyway, let's dial the "Way Back Clock" to Spring of 1999 on a rainy evening in Monticello, Minnesota. I had successfully retreated to the computer room at my apartment. Windows98 was misbehaving yet again. I cursed. No amount of defragmenting the disk would speed things up. Antivirus applications reported "All Clear", and yet, performance was dog slow. No matter. All I wanted to do was get on-line and frag some poor, deluded, pimple-nosed punk who thought they could catch LtFunf. It wasn't going to happen; not that night, anyway! With a 2 liter of Mountain Dew to my left, peppered beef jerky to my right, and a bag of Skittles in front of me, the little bastards wouldn't know what hit them. And then it happened. Blue Screen of Death. BSoD. The end of the end. No! Not again! I had reinstalled the month before! It couldn't happen again so soon! Arrggggg! The blue light bathed the room. Silence. I gazed over to my CD case. She was in there, calling. "I would never treat you the way he does," she purred. "I would never hurt you." I unzipped the black nylon case slowly. "He never understood you anyway." I flipped the mylar envelopes, passing the disk with the hand-scrawled "Windows Utilities", passing the professionally printed CD labeled "Windows 98 Upgrade Edition!". There She was, in brushed-metal silver. In black sharpie was written the words "Debian GNU/Linux" and "Disc 1". Ben Kochie had helped me install Debian on an old 486 machine to replace a poorly written firewall earlier that year. I had been dual booting my workstation at home for the last year or so with an old version of Red Hat, 4.2. Dependencies were difficult to resolve. Rather than finding packages on the CD that were required for the software to be installed, you had to read the errors that popped up and then guess at what the package name might be, search for it on the disk, and then install that one. Lather, rinse, repeat. Debian had been exceedingly easy to install. I recalled a statement that a chicken pecking at the ENTER key could install it. I looked back up at the blue CRT. Could I do it this time? Could I quit Windows cold turkey? . . . . . . It's the year 2006, Spring once again, and I reflect upon that fateful night that I left Windows behind. Oh, I had reinstalled Windows again when a new game was released that I just had to play, but eventually I quit buying games. I quit booting into Windows for any reason whatsoever. I didn't want to have to deal with yet another Windows installation. Then Transgaming came on to the scene with Cedega. I purchased Half Life, and reawakened my carnal beast... in Linux. I can laugh at myself now, at how forgiving I was toward software. When Outlook died and lost all of my email, I was irate, but ultimately complacent. When Windows crashed, I simply rebooted. When Windows "got old and slow", I reinstalled. Then she came in to my life, and my world was changed. I never went back. When I have to install Windows on some work machine, I feel physical pain. When I go home, she's there, running still. Safe. Secure. Stable. Perhaps I should mention Fast, Responsive, and Fun? How about Power? Free Beer? Freedom? I believe there's a place for Windows and Microsoft. It keeps me employed because it's so fragile. How can I complain about that? Microsoft had done such a great job pulling the wool over the public's eyes, that they don't realize they've been swindled. Perhaps some day, they'll learn. Perhaps cows will rule the world. "Moo." -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/ assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */