What I’ll Miss in Ubuntu / How Windows has Scarred Me

Windows haves given me a disease. To accurately describe this disease I will be coining the term WMAD or Windows Maintenance Anxiety Disease. On my Windows desktop, I always am running a defrag tool or the disk recovery utility when I am away from my computer, so I can use my wasted time to improve my PC’s performance.

Unfortunately, there is no need for a defragger in Ubuntu and the disk space recovery tool takes just a few seconds. It makes me feel uncomfortable leaving my computer running without it doing something for me.

I remember someone’s comment on a blog I read, “It’s amazing how a filesystem can be so screwed up that you have to use a program to put the files back together again.”

Things I’ve learned from Linux #2

I own my computer.

With Linux, I have the power to do whatever I want with my computer. If I want to delete a file, linux never questions my competence. It faithfully deletes that file, without any objection, even if I tell it to delete itself with “rm -rf /” (Note: DO NOT RUN THIS!).

There is no “Are you sure…” dialogue for any task less than dangerous. Want to delete a file? Done. Install a program? Done.

Of course this method allows you to destroy your system. But I CAN destroy my own system, because I own it.

Things I’ve learned from linux #1

I’m going to try and share with you what Linux has shown me what computers can do.

My first lesson is that even after updating 76 megabytes of critical system files, no restart is required. Now my Linux laptop hardly ever is turned off; it just hibernates. While on my windows pc, I have to restart a lot. (keep in mind that since I am using ubuntu 9.04, I get critical file updates almost every day.)

I’ve heard of hotswap (or something like that in Vista) that applies updates without restarting, however, it doesn’t work for all files and even restarts in the middle of a movie. Is that really necessary?