Arve Bersvendsen

Comment from Per M. Marthinussen on 2008-06-19 23:54

October 2007

XP Pro and Vista Home

Ubuntu 7.10

I was tired of viruses and trojans

Comment from hseldon on 2008-06-20 00:20

April 2008

xp

I was tired of reinstalling XP every 9 months and totally sick of Symantec Antivirus. Plus, I saw the compiz 3d desktop. Wow! Way cooler than anything I’ve seen on Windows or Mac. Ubuntu 8.04 - must have. So far, so good.

Comment from Marcos Caceres on 2008-06-20 02:02

1. When did you switch?
About 6 months ago

2. Which version of Windows did you switch from?
Vista and XP

3. Which OS did you switch to?
MacOS X

4. Why did you switch to your current OS?
Because windows sucks next to MacOS X (Vista = slow clunky crashy crappy use experience)… though I still think Windows XP is kinda ok.

Comment from Eira Monstad on 2008-06-20 08:53

1. Slowly, starting with one machine in 2000. It was fun to play with, but too slow to actually do anything useful. It was an old machine. Then, around a year or two later, I started using Solaris at the university and discovered how much more natural it felt to me. Things were just more the way I wanted them to be, even if I hadn’t known what I wanted until then. In 2002 I used Debian at work in my summer job. I made the final switch on desktop around 2003.

2. Windows 2000.

3. My first install was Red Hat 6.1. After trying out Debian at work, I was quite certain that wasn’t what I wanted, so I went for Mandrake. I switched to Fedora not too long after that, and that’s what I’ve stuck with up until just a few months ago. For various reasons detailed in my blog, I’m now using Kubuntu with KDE4.

4. See 1). Linux/Unix just aligns more with my way of thinking. I want an OS that a) does what it can to do things for me when I don’t need to do them myself (hence no old-school Debian or Gentoo) but b) doesn’t get in my way when trying to do something slightly outside the paved road (hence no Windows or OSX). Coming from a DOS past, I’m keyboard-centric rather than mouse-centric, so I never felt at home in the Mac world. I hate the fact that Windows has no package manager, no pre-installed drivers and most of the time leaves you clueless when something goes wrong. (That mostly applies to OSX too)

The above also answers my choice of web browser, actually. I don’t want to have to go out of my way to find and install lots of extensions manually to get a useful browser. I’m lazy, I want it all right out of the box. Opera it is then.

Comment from mr. ray on 2008-06-20 12:54

Dual booting since 2006
No more XP and Vista Feb 2008 when I got my printer working in ubuntu. Linux rocks! No more virus scanning, spyware scanning and defragmenting! Never slowdown since I install- windows are fast first time but after a month of use it become very sloooow.

Comment from WOFall on 2008-06-20 16:45

I can’t switch! :(

I live at home, and there is 0% chance of my dad switching. He “needs windows for work” and all… Dual booting would be “pointless” when “we allready have a paid for OS”.

If i had a choice, i would use Ubuntu :)

Comment from kalaallit nunaat on 2008-06-20 20:55

1. When did you switch?
— On Tuesday in mid-2005 ;)

2. Which version of Windows did you switch from?
—-XP

3. Which OS did you switch to?
—- FreeBSD, after a 14-day interim rendez-vous with GNU

4. Why did you switch to your current OS?
—- A million reasons, do you have all day? I have had the chance to compare various nixish and gnuish systems, and my choice is the global optimum given the objective function ;)

Comment from Ted Dobyns on 2008-06-21 07:19

1) I haven’t fully switched as I play a lot of games and most of them are not supported by WINE, but I started playing around with Linux over a year ago and setup a more permanent workstation a few months ago.

2) Windows XP (choice was go vista or get into something else)

3) ArchLinux, after experimenting with more user-friendly environments, I decided a minimalist desktop was the way for me. Arch allows me to be very much in control of everything and I’ve setup a desktop with the awesome window manager (tiling window managers FTW!). I really like Arch as well because it uses an rc.conf file similar to BSD systems.

4) Linux is so much more friendly to developers (despite Steve Ballmer yelling it at the top of his lungs over and over), everything is open source so you’re able to learn from other peoples code, documentation is abundant, and the CLI allows you to do so much more than the Windows CMD Prompt. Setting up webservers is easy and OpenSSL is fantastic (unless you’re using Debian XD). I learned so much just by setting up a dedicated server in my closet. Basically what this all comes down to is just how much I’ve learned from using Linux and tinkering with the insides. I don’t know of any other environment where I could get the same hands on experience.

Comment from Denilson Figueiredo de Sá on 2008-06-21 18:25

1. When did you switch?
First half of 2003.

2. Which version of Windows did you switch from?
Windows ME.

3. Which OS did you switch to?
Slackware Linux. Later, I’ve switched to Gentoo Linux.

4. Why did you switch to your current OS?
Too many crashes, loooooong startup time (more than 2 or 3 minutes).

Of course, there are things that now prevent me from switching back: Gnu/Linux software is much better, the shell is incredibly powerful, there are tons of great software to be combined in shell scripts (that’s somewhat heritage from Unix), so much more powerful and faster, and so on. With Gnu/Linux, I have the power, I have control over the system. And Gnu/Linux does not annoy me like Windows does (Windows Vista is even more annoying).

I’ve blogged about this on December 2005.

Nowadays, I’m going to let my notebook dual-boot just to play games.

Comment from morten on 2008-06-22 21:30

1: May of last year.

2: XP Pro

3: Mac OS X (Tiger, now upgraded to Leopard)

4: My Dell laptop died on me and I wanted to make the move to what I both then and now regard as a more powerful platform. Not only is my MacBook Pro better looking than any Windows-based laptop I’ve seen, but the OS looks good, works well, and I get a terminal window when I need one.

Comment from dude on 2008-06-23 17:39

1. When did you switch?
January 08/April 08

2. Which version of Windows did you switch from?
Windows XP

3. Which OS did you switch to?
OSX (jan) and Ubuntu (apr)

4. Why did you switch to your current OS?
This is going to be long as this did not happen overnight…

In early 2000, my boss invited me (I’m a graphic designer but I’ve always been pretty tech savvy, and also having no preference between Mac OS and Windows) to a meeting with a guy pitching his company’s networking services to us. He was telling us that he would run our network on free software called Linux and that because of this we would save money because we’d just be paying him for setup and maintenance. We of course, we shorted sighted and figured free software couldn’t be as secure as paid software and wrote him off. But he planted the seed in my head… Later that year, I needed a router for my small home network and Googled up solutions. One solution suggested using an old PC running a small floppy distro - it worked great and it was rock solid. I don’t think I’ve ever had to reboot it. A couple of years later I tried Red Hat but found it confusing (installing programs from commandline? yuck) and my wife hated Openoffice (which was pretty young at the time) because it wasn’t very compatible with MSOffice at her work. I ended up reinstalling Windows.

Fast forward to 2008: I needed a new laptop (was running a old Dell 1GHz w/ 256MB) and bought a Macbook. OSX is somewhat similar to Linux so I started to dual boot my desktop between XP (for gaming - WINE is much too slow) and Ubuntu (I bought into the hype) because I was sick of maintaining my machine from getting worms and spyware, also it seemed that XP gets slower as time goes on. I had been playing with earlier versions of Ubuntu but Hardy Heron seemed to be so polished I actually kept using it for more than a week. Gutsy didn’t like my Nvidia card without a lot of tweaking (which turned me off). Hardy worked right off the bat. The add/remove program was also a huge selling point for me. It’s so easy to explore the wealth of software that’s out there. Yes, so it took me 8 years to convert me. Hopefully in the next 8 I won’t even need to dual boot for gaming!

Comment from Cibbuano on 2008-06-24 04:09

1. When did you switch?
In 2006

2. Which version of Windows did you switch from?
Windows XP

3. Which OS did you switch to?
Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

4. Why did you switch to your current OS?
I resisted out of lethargy for years… then a friend in IT showed me his PC running Feisty. It was clean and simple, he used it for all his work, and I was impressed. He told me about repositories and shared libraries, and I was intrigued.

Meanwhile, my XP installation was getting increasingly crowded and was starting to slow down. I ran several ‘cleaners’, but I was forced to reinstall - then, collecting drivers was a pain, as was getting all the software I had before. I looked into dual-booting and downloaded a live CD.

After installation of Ubuntu, I was reasonably pleased, though I thought it looked a little clumsy.

I installed Kubuntu and found that it ran a lot better on my laptop, looking good and complete with great apps.

At work, I had to do something on a new Vista-laptop. Even though the Aero looked good, I was offended at how invasive the system was, slowing me down with constant popups. My lips tightened into a grim line and I knew I wasn’t interested in updating to Vista.

Now, I’m enthusiastic about Linux. I don’t know a damn thing, but when I have a problem, I look forward to checking out the forums and finding a community solution. It’s a terrific feeling, being in control of my computer again.

Comment from Alan on 2008-07-16 05:20

Hey, comments are open again, and I’m going on hols tomorrow ! For synchronicity like that, I guess you’ll have to get the whole post from there

Short version here:

I switched away 20 years ago, and (despite best efforts by those who need help) have never gone back. My latest switch was to a Mac, and that’s nearly as bad, it’s just Steve’s box instead of Bill’s.

On a Linux box: it’s not Linus’s box, it mine.