Three years on the GNU/Linux road

Published October 24, 2011

Summary:It's been about three years, since I finally migrated all of my personal PCs for my immediate family from Windows XP to Fedora Linux. I had used it for many years previous to that, but I had held off on migrating all of my PCs permanently because of issues with getting apps to work in Wine, and problems finding apps to replace proprietary ones I had used up to that point.

It's been about three years, since I finally migrated all of my personal PCs for my immediate family from Windows XP to Fedora Linux. I had used it for many years previous to that, but I had held off on migrating all of my PCs permanently because of issues with getting apps to work in Wine, and problems finding apps to replace proprietary ones I had used up to that point.

It's been a pretty smooth ride on Fedora during the past 3 years though, for me and my family. I originally installed Fedora 9, and have upgraded the PCs to Fedora 14 during that time. I originally set up a Windows XP virtual machine in VirtualBox for those times where applications MUST run in a Windows environment, where there is no Linux alternative. But those cases are getting more rare now. I haven't used my XP virtual machine in quite some time. I have realized one thing though, that staying on Fedora's current release does take some extra time to upgrade from version to version. I have stated in other posts I became sick of maintaining Windows XP, and yet I've found that I still do need extra time to upgrade Fedora. But, I should mention that I don't absolutely need to upgrade to the latest versions, but I do it mainly to upgrade all of the applications to their latest version, like Firefox, Thunderbird, and other software on the PCs. Overall, it's a nice and easy way to "refresh" both the Linux kernel and all of the applications installed in one easy step.

Replacing the old proprietary applications has been fairly straightforward. Adobe Photoshop? Replaced with GIMP. Adobe Audition? Replaced with Audacity. Adobe Premiere? Replaced with Kino and OpenShot. Microsoft Office? Replaced with OpenOffice. BrokenCross CD Manager? Replaced with GTKtalog. Ulead DVD Movie Factory? Replaced with DVDStyler. And the list goes on. I've also found some nice new applications in GNU/Linux for kids that need to use our computers, like GCompris and TuxPaint. And GNU/Linux also includes a huge number of games, including Solitaire and others.

And for other relatives that I migrated, things are going well on that front as well. Viruses, malware, and spam all increase during the last quarter of the year as we approach the holidays. It's peace of mind this time of year when things get more busy than ever, that the chance of viruses and other problems will be kept to a minimum because they are no longer using Windows.