On Christmas day, I converted my Windows Vista laptop to run Unbuntu, a Linux distribution. The decision came after years of looking at Linux and wanting to try it. Finally, I got around to it and made the leap to Ubuntu.
Here are a few of my first impressions:
1. It runs a lot faster than Windows. This may be obvious to some but it still amazed me how much faster it was, especially when recognizing peripheral devices.
2. It takes a lot less room. For me, it reduced the size of the OS installation by about 40 gigs.
3. I don’t need to defragment my hard drive. I am (was?) a big advocate of keeping your hard drive clean: Delete your junk files, clean your registry, and defrag. But with Linux, you don’t need to defrag because the file system constantly keeps it optimized. No need to clean the registry because there is none. Junk files are much decreased as far as I can tell.
4. I don’t need some of the standard Windows internet security features. I don’t need a firewall because Linux doesn’t show open ports (something like that, please excuse my novice ways). No need for antivirus – viruses are theoretically possible but no one writes them, except a few to prove that it can be done. No antispyware software is needed because spyware is written for Windows (similar to viruses in that regard).
The last two of these have been the most difficult to wrap my mind around. It is like getting let out of prison and not knowing how to handle the freedom. It feels wonderfully strange.