Here I'm republishing an old blog post of mine originally from July 2012. I've updated it slightly.
Where was I? Right... Windows XP.
When I first saw it, I just thought: "You've got to be kidding!" What was this? A _blue_ task bar with a _green_ start button and a terribly colorful background! I still recall what came to my mind right away: "Don't do drugs, man!" Of course, a few seconds later, I had it all set back to classic. Then I attempted to update the system. Guess what? It didn’t work - IE crashed. I tried again, but same thing. Great stuff!
Reboot. What's this? The desktop is back to ugly! Alright, alright, let's change it aga... What? It's still set to "classic"? Wow, if that's classic, I don't know where I've been all the years! Let's set it to "new" then. Of course nothing changes. And now back to classic. Ahh, much better. Windows update again? _Crash!_ You know what, buddy? Just go to hell (from where thou must’ve risen)!
Insert DOS boot disk into floppy drive, reset. Wait a moment. FDISK.
Yes, that was my first contact with Windows XP. And as you can see, we didn't really make friends right away... Actually I disliked just about everything of this new OS. The exorbitant size when installed, the wasteful usage of RAM, the way it dares to tell me what I wasn't allowed to do (on my system! Who the heck decides this? Myself - or Mickysoft?), and so on. Not even to talk about forced registration, which is completely unacceptable. MS got our money and my father used to register every version of Windows with MS - voluntary. Which is fine. But I was really upset and this was the moment when Redmond begun to lose me. I decided to go on with Win2k for as long as possible and then abandon the Windows platform.
Windows 2000 with control panel right after installation: Clean looks
Freshly installed Windows XP with control panel: Could be called "CandyOS"
But where to go then? I had been playing around with FreeDOS and achieved some incredible things (burning CDs in DOS, watching DivX videos on a Pentium 90, browse the net graphically with the Arachne browser, running Windows applications in pure DOS, etc.). I liked the system quite a bit since I knew what every single file on my system did and there was not one program or anything there that I didn't want to have on my drive. But frankly speaking... And while OpenGEM is kind of cool, DOS is simply not a modern desktop system - especially since drivers are a huge problem and the 32-bit version FD32 seems to go nowhere. It's very nice for tinkering but not a real alternative today.
I had known Linux for a while. Or rather: I had known that it existed. A teacher who tried to get into it himself had founded a “Linux club” at school. Being interested in computers in general, I had joined it. But while the teacher was trying to get things working, the rest of us typically had Windows running on their machine and played network games or surfed the net. As far as I can remember, we started with SuSE 6.2 back then (SuSE was the most popular distro in Germany at that time). I looked at the system only briefly and found it to be far too complicated. What I disliked most at that time was the case-sensitive file system. I had witnessed how it cause trouble all the time.
SuSE favored KDE over GNOME. Being a Windows user at the time, I didn’t quite get it how there could be more than one DE and I thought: “If KDE is the standard one, it must be the _better_ one, too.” Fatal thinking! While I liked the BASH shell a lot, I hated KDE. So I soon decided that Linux wasn't a choice for my home PC...
At home I had convinced my father that we needed a PC that would work as a gateway / router so that all our PCs could access the Internet at the same time. We had another old PC that was just collecting dust anyway (but no idea how to set up a machine as a router). Thinking about our club, I proposed Linux. It was allowed to copy it freely after all and I knew that it was said to be perfectly suited for such a task. My father agreed but instead of downloading it for free, he bought SuSE 7.0 Professional. Primarily because of the support option for it as he said (but we never reached out to the support at all).
(It came with kernel 2.2.17, XFree86 4.0, KDE 1.1.2, GNOME 1.2 and StarOffice 5.2 - plus an optional KDE 2.0 preview!)
Thanks to a friend who was a bit into Linux we managed to get a router up and running. It was painful, though, and took us way more than one evening / night of configuration work... But once the server was up, it just worked. And it did so for a very long time. Only after a power outage it refused to boot up again, since the filesystems were reported damaged (and we had no idea what to really do about that). We then reorganized our network so that we no longer needed the router PC at all. I kind of forgot about Linux for quite some time.
When I bought a new PC, I got one with a dual-core CPU. Finally I realized that I could not really go on with Win2k anymore without hurting myself. I thought that I had no other option but to install XP. And as I had a legal license for it, anyway, I did. I was never happy with this OS, though, and I still consider it a pretty much _bearable_ operating system but surely not a decent or even great one.
Some software refused to run (properly) on Windows XP, other software begun to require that version. I tried to do best with what I had now, but using my computer was not as much fun anymore as it had before (except for the games, of course).
I had heard about this new “Windows Vista” thing and seen Mr. Ballmer dance. And of course I had read about it on the net. However this time I wasn't angry. "Vista" didn't even deserve it. It was just plain laughable. Not an OS but rather an abomination. This time it was clear that I would never buy it. No sir, I've really had it this time! For a while I might stick with XP - but what to do then?
That day came when I was really fed up with my WinXP machine and I decided to give Linux a shot again and see what had happened in the meantime...
Everybody was talking about Ubuntu these days. I knew that there were _Live-CDs_. I thought that this was a pretty nice thing that I just had to try out for myself. So I downloaded an Ubuntu image and burned it on a CD. Shortly thereafter the fun started.
It took quite a while to start up, but this was because of the slow CD drive. After it finished loading, I was immediately impressed. Now _this_ was a desktop to my liking! Something way different - but for the better. Very clearly laid out and really simple to use. At first I found it strange to have two panels (one at the top and one at the bottom), but I soon liked that, too. I played around with it for a while and for the first time in years, I "felt at home". It was also great to have Open Office pre-installed just like many other useful programs.
Since I was willing to change anyway, I made a backup of my drives and then installed Ubuntu as a second system. It worked well and I used it more and more often. After figuring out how things work and getting replacements for programs I used to work with, I soon booted into Windows only very rarely and finally decided to kick it. I also was a bit older now and didn't consider things like the way the drives are organized "strange" but actually realized that it was superior.
KDE 1 (SuSE 7) - this is what actually prevented me from using Linux in 1999
GNOME 2 (Ubuntu 8.10) - and this got me back to it!
A lot has happened since then. My beloved GNOME 2.x is dead (save for MATE), Ubuntu has changed for Unity (which I deem unusable on a desktop) and so on. I tried out a lot of distros and desktop environments and learned to live with the big ecosystem that is Linux (GNU/Linux and other software but also the community and the _spirit_). There’s a ton of things going on - many that I like and some which I don't like so much. But this is where you begin to do things your own way, right?
