Abort, Retry, Ignore… Nevermore?
I installed Linux again. This is like the fourth or fifth time. This time I found a new distribution: Mepis. I tried it out on my CrapTop(tm) at work (yeah – I scavenged an old low-end laptop to experiment on) and I got it working! So I brought the CD home and hooked up a spare 20 gig hard drive and installed it at home. Carrie was a little scared at first – but I assured her that I didn’t touch our Windows install. Long story short – I’m making this entry from Firefox on my new Linux installation.
With the coming of age of Firefox, Thunderbird and the new slew of quality open-source software, it may be possible in the not too distant future for the ‘ma and pa internet’ users to not have to be relegated to high-priced, buggy software.
I was reading through some articles on-line the other day and ran across a bunch of responses that readers had written to an article that was written to warn people away from Firefox and open-source software. Of course, I understand that the responses were mostly authored by (fellow?) open-source zealots…but this particular response made me think:
MS knows that once people are running Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice on 30% to 40% of computers, then there is nothing stopping people from switching to Linux underneath those three applications with no problem. MS is very scared of this, and it’s a shame, too, just when they were looking forward to locking everyone into Windows perminantly[sic]…
Computerworld “Readers Respond to Firefox”
So… I switched.