Swings and ­Roundabouts

Working as I do in a Microsoft Windows-centric IT department has its challenges. None of them technical. Many years of installing and reinstalling Microsoft operating systems and the multitude of other software, patches, updates, workarounds and fixes has become second nature. So much so that I often have waking nightmares involving Office 2007, docx, Eu-fu!*ing-dora, MS-SQL, MSDE, Visual Studio, Service Pack 3, Genuine Advantage and Outlookpst files. When I say not technical, I mean it, all this stuff is just knowledge. When to click, Next, OK or Cancel. These are pathways my brain has gone down so many times that my poor neurons have burnt pathways through my grey matter like CRT burn-in.

I love tech stuff and I feel like my utter boredom of Windows is killing my passion. That is why I am so happy to have finally gone ahead and installed Ubuntu on my work computer. I am still waiting for some bureaucrat to tell me, “It is our policy to run Windows”. Now I am more in control of my work, I can still access the local network using Samba, I can print to the LPD printers using CUPS, I can test Windows apps using VMWare, VirtualBox or even WINE. I can do all of this on a workstation that would struggle to run these apps under Windows.

The best bit is this, my colleagues get to see that Linux is not scary or hard to use and that it runs circles round Vista.