A few weeks back I mentioned that I would be ditching Windows 7 when my RC trial was up and this past weekend I finally did. It’s been a few years since I tried to run linux full time so what better time than now to give it another shot. Here is a run down of how I managed to climb out from the Microsoft black hole (at least on my home machine).
Email and Calendars: I am an Outlook addict. I love the interface, know the in’s and out’s, and the configuration like the back of my hand. Troubleshooting is a breeze and it’s posed to be very reliable for me. My email account is with gmail, so the interface there for messaging is something I am very used to. No problems there. My big fear was loosing the calendar in Outlook, which I use for managing ever event in my life- no joke. As a self-proclaimed scatter brain it seemed to be the only way to keep me on track. I was able to successfully export all of my Outlook events to Gmail Calendars, and able to separate my bills/paid bills onto their own calendars as well. This was much cleaner than using categories in Outlook. All in all it was worth the switch and it takes away one less layer to synchronize.
Documents and Storage: I have a secondary hard drive I use for most file storage such as documents, music, photos, etc..I was concerned that since the disk is NTFS, I would have some issues in easily accessing files and mounting the drive. All said and done, mounting the drive was as easy as checking a box and everything was accessible. The difference in file systems didn’t to be an issue whatsoever. Between OpenOffice and Google Docs, my document work should be covered as well.
Being able to utilize SaaS applications, and have most of what I do operate via the web- Linux really has become a great way to run a machine for those power users up for a new challenge. The one issue I did run into is that my 3Com Wireless adapter was not able to run on the 64 bit installation. However, I did find some tutorials that would’ve worked a 32 bit install. My next step will be running certain Windows/Mac only software using Wine. I’ll get some feedback up when I get into it.
Similar Posts
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
