hello. my name is tom, and i’m a windows user. (chorus: hello tom, welcome to windows anonymous).

i’ve been a windows user since my first 386, maybe 10 years ago. 3.1, 95, 98, 2000. by ‘user’ i mean it’s been my primary operating system, the one that i interact with most. i’m pretty familiar with linux, and have been running a linux server for various tasks at my house for a couple years, but didn’t use it for the day-to-day things. until a couple months ago, that is. right after i got my powerbook, i decided that i was going to do it. make the big switch. so i moved my e-mail and ide over to the idle linux machine in my cube and started coding.. and haven’t looked back. the only thing that i miss is trillian, the integrated chat client. i tried to use a couple open source ones that i found, like gabber, but couldn’t get them to work, they have reliance on too many 3rd party rpms that don’t seem to want to play together. i think i’m going to install abiword since staroffice word kinda sucks. and probably gnumeric since i’m going to remove staroffice entirely. but by and large, my transition was pretty seamless (except for the hours waiting for my mp3’s to copy over ;). and now that i’m on linux, i can’t even remember why i used windows. free updates! a n amazing package manager. free applications. who needs to pirate stuff when open source stuff is better than any commercial applications? now if people would start porting their games to linux, that would be the last step for me eliminating windows entirely. i must say, however, that the most recent 3 games that i have bought, (myst 3, safecracker, undying) were all for my mac. and diablo 2 runs on mac too. sorry microsoft, you’ve lost another.

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