The entire IT staff here at the Secret Lair has been treading on eggshells for the past two days, biting its collective lip in anxiety and waiting for the sudden but inevitable betrayal of the new ‘pooter’s file system. This is caused by numerous email warnings from the Lair’s Linux Guru, who in the interest of our world-class security we’ll just call “Claire.” Claire warned me that I could transfer files to the new ‘pooter all I wanted, but until I had completed an entire grimoire of arcane and eldritch Linux rites so dark and complex as to scorch my very soul I would never be able to read them again.
Yeah, Claire’s aware that Uncle Joel’s “arcane” bar is set very low.
But none of that seems to have been necessary. Once I’ve punched in the username and password the cute little notebook seems happy to turn over all the emo poems, bread recipes and Leslie Fish songs to any passerby, be it NSA spymaster or random trespasser. So I guess my fears have been for naught.
I feel your pain. I have a total of one week’s experience with Ubuntu. I blame Claire for planting the seed. It took one day to install and 3 days to get the VPN working. Which, by the way, has to be launched from the command line, as do several other programs I use on a regular basis. Linux will never catch on with the mainstream until they eliminate the need for the *&%+#^@ command line. It seems to work OK but it isn’t really superior to windows from a user standpoint as far as I can see so far. It does grant the user Geek Points however. I’m going to continue using it but I’m not ready to delete my windows 7 partition just yet.
Oh, I wasn’t complaining. And it’s very true Linux Geeks kept me away from Linux for years (“It’s simple! All you have to do is [insert thousands of words that may be ‘simple’ to the speaker and God, but he lost me at ‘is’]”)
But I’ve used Linux Mint (courtesy of Claire) for years now, and with nary an approach to a command line. Once installed it’s as easy to use as Windows, at worst it’s no more buggy than Windows, and it doesn’t report to Microsoft. I’ve grown to love it. So much so, in fact, that with this new ‘pooter I never considered installing anything else even if I had to [try to] install it myself.