Portrait of Edd Dumbill, taken by Giles Turnbull

Subscribe to updates

Feed icon Atom or RSS

or get email updates

What I make

expectnation
a conference management web application


XTech Conference
a European web technology conference

Exit Windows, mostly

About a month and a bit ago I wrote of my plan to remove the final Windows machine from my network. Well, this is how I did it, as told last week to some colleagues at O'Reilly.

My wife, who uses the Windows machine, recently took a holiday with friends in Estonia. While she was away I sneakily installed another disk in her PC and put a GNOME/Debian Linux installation on it, and set it up exactly with all the applications she normally uses. (Though I use Debian, the net effect of my customisations was pretty much the same as installing Red Hat 9 or the latest SuSE would have been.) This actually took me no longer than a fresh Windows install and installation of accompanying applications would have taken. To assist migration, I used CrossOver Office to keep Word and PowerPoint there, and Win4Lin to run one legacy app that had no hope in hell of ever running under Wine.

Pretty proud of myself, I then bottled it at the last minute and rebooted the box back into Windows. Some things, I thought, weren't worth it.

So we merrily potter along for a few weeks until all of a sudden her Windows box starts blue-screening every time she starts Word. I make some tentative explorations into the registry, but can't seem to solve anything. Thus the only option remaining is the time-honoured reinstall. I don't have enough time for that.

Promising to install Windows later if she wants, I switch the box into Linux and start up. Everything is different, and she panics a little. (Probably no more than she would have done confronted with OS X, actually, it was the different login screen that was the freaky bit.)

A week and a bit later, she's happily using the machine under Linux without a problem. In fact with fewer problems. Evolution was no problem for her after Outlook Express, she thinks Gaim is fine for instant messaging, Epiphany's a straightforward web browser, and office stuff works pretty much as before. Her verdict was "well, it all pretty much looks the same."

Of course, I didn't push my luck by explaining that with my careful font setup it looks a heck of a lot less ugly than Windows ever did (not to mention that the results of usability studies are vastly more evident in GNOME 2.2/2.4 than in Windows XP.) I just breathed a sigh of relief that I wouldn't have to do another reinstall any time soon.

OK, there are no big lessons to draw from this: I'm pretty experienced with setting up (good looking) Linux desktops, and we did cheat by using CrossOver in order to keep MS Office for now.

Nevertheless, one year ago, I would not have been able to do this.

The era of the Linux desktop is coming.

blog comments powered by Disqus


You are reading the weblog of Edd Dumbill, writer, programmer, entrepreneur and free software advocate.
Copyright © 2000-2012 Edd Dumbill