You see, since I got my first PC back in 1998 I've been a straight Windows user. Ten years ago Linux was much more exotic than it is now, and of course Win98 was the hot stuff. It would crash every now and then, but the worst thing I risked was losing my game-saves. I kept my first PC for seven years, and hell, that was a great machine. It would perform reasonably well even in 2005 (reasonably - it would manage to handle Quake 3, high detail settings and all, it would play movies and do quite a lot of cool stuff).
I only decided to replace it when I actually started to earn money. So I bought a new machine, fixed up with XP (I guess I occasionally suffer remorse as I gave away my old computer to some less affluent neighbours; much as I try to convince myself that it was a good thing to do, I somehow think I shouldn't have done it... it is silly, after all it's just a tool, a mere machine, but after seven years that cranky old bastard felt more like an old pal).
Anyway, the new computer is still going strong, despite it's apparent age.
Now, I spent the last eleven years exclusively in Windows. Damn, I have used the same Winamp skin for like nine years. I had a well cared-for Windows going for three years. And I can't say I was unhappy with it. The crashes were few and far apart, and I only managed to lose all my data once. With all the talk about the suckiness of Windows I consider myself lucky - or the stories are way exaggerated. It's hard for me to say, since apart from some office programs, the Internet and games I've never used my machines to do the extreme stuff. Anyway, I was happy with Windows.
Last year I heard about Puppy. I heard about it thanks to DSL. I stumbled upon DSL somewhere in the Internets and was very intrigued by the name. This led me to a Wikipedia article about mini-Linuxes which in turn led me to Puppy. I have never before even considered any serious changes to my OS for one simple reason - I never got around to buying a CD-burner and I accumulated a lot of stuff on my HDD - music, pictures, e-books, all the stuff I wouldn't want to really lose. And losing it seemed inevitable as all the OSes required me to format my HDD. All except Puppy who wouldn't even give a damn whether I had a hard drive or not. And when it did it wasn't bothered none by my file systems, ntfses, partitions and the whole lot. It would neatly save itself into its own save file, exactly like a computer game would.
Of course things are different - I haven't figured out the folder structure yet, I have no idea where the programs actually go etc. etc. But I am and was impressed by the little yet versatile thing.
And that's when I first seriously considered moving. With XP dying out and me unwilling to buy and my machine unable to run Vista, the super fast, minimalistic, neat and vibrant Puppy felt like a good, if exotic, choice. So I spent the last year in an on and off relationship with Puppy, booting to it when I needed to check my mail really fast (the 3 year-old Windows was pretty stable, but it would take it like 3 minutes to boot, as if every year added another minute) or when I simply felt like playing with it.
And it's a good system. It lets me do all the essential things and somehow doing them feels good. I get the feeling that it is a child of love and that a lot of personal effort was put into it. It feels tangible and authentic and devoid of the corporate zombie scent.
Actually I would only go back to Windows to play games (yes, I am a long time gamer and I love playing).
And this Sunday I proved myself to be a moron. I decided to get rid of Windows and put Kubuntu in its place. I'm not even sure why.
"It seemed like a good idea at that time". Bugger.
The installation was successful. I kept all my precious things on a second partition too. I figured that if I'm happy with a little distro, I'll be overjoyed with a big one.
How foolish! It has all the things I found to be quirky in Puppy (down to the crashing Firefox, although the crashes are less frequent) and NONE of the good things. It keeps asking me the password, even I want to change the bloody time! (which ain't going too well either: I like my clocks to be going 10 minutes faster and when I set the Kubuntu clock it just reverts to a proper time after the reboot DESPITE the fact I've unchecked the "get your time from the web" option).
It feels big. It's got a messed up menu. You can't switch off the transparency on the taskbar. There is no blinking computer icon in the corner of the screen which tells me if I'm online or not. It's got a dozen doodads but nothing that would even resemble the "My Computer" in Windows or the mounter in Puppy, so I can't really assess how much space I got left on the drives (right-clicking and selecting the properties on the /home makes the file manager crash and gets me to desktop) and so on. These are all trivial things, and I'm sure there are ways to cope with them. I just CAN'T be bothered with it. I want my blinky-thingy damn it!
With all the hype around Ubuntu it feels half-baked, exactly the way some critics said it does. And I find it simply annoying.
Perhaps deep down, in the guts, it is a better OS than Windows, but the experience for me has been irritating this far. I have a short fuse, and if my OS don't want to tell me how much free disk space it's got it makes me go berserk.
There's simply to many pesky little things in Kubuntu that make my ears steam.
Thank gods for Puppy. It already saved my girlfriends data where here machine crashed, and now it's saving me from going bonkers over my poor distro choice. I can't explain it but it feels soothing and well thought of and right. Almost home.
Now, Kubuntu is going bye-bye tomorrow or over the weekend. I have obtained a Mandriva cd, so I may try this one out. I probably will try it out if only to compare it with Kubuntu. And even if it feels better (as it is not so much a matter of Kubuntu not working right but of it not feeling right) I probably won't keep it anyway.
At this stage I'm seriously considering either doing a full hdd install of Puppy or going back to Windows.
There is something very exciting in running my operations on a 100mb distro, but Windows is familiar to me, and I feel more at ease with it. The odds are even at the moment.
Now, I am well aware that this a horribly long post, so thank you if you got this far.
And I'm also aware that it does not quite fit in the "Puppy Power" section of the forum. Although, maybe it does after all?
The question I would like to ask my fellow users, especially the Linux-newbies and Windows converts - what are your experiences or disappointments?
PS> After some thought I decided that this post belongs in this section after all. I can vouch that Puppy beats at least one major distro in every aspect, even though I've learned it the hard and bloody annoying way.
Thanks for reading
