About 2 months ago, I convinced my girlfriend to try out Linux for a month after a really nasty bit of spyware infected her computer. This isn’t a bash on Microsoft, but it happened twice in about a month.
Unfortunately, a roommate who pays a portion of the internet bill (and thus welcome to use the computer, which is located in the living room) likes to browse nefarious websites, I’ll let you speculate what type of websites he visits. Browsing those kind of sites by itself is completely fine by me, as long as it doesn’t fsck up the computer. The spyware/adware/etcware attracting behaviors of the roommate got some nasty sh!t on the computer – TWICE in a month. I tried to get everyone in the house to use Firefox, and that went over well.
Even if the shady websites are surfed upon using Firefox, if you install software from said websites, it’s all over anyways. I can’t help stupid user syndrome. Quite simply, I had enough at that point, I’m sure as hell not going to backup, fdisk, format and reinstall Windows every two weeks. Plus, I really don’t want to have that uncomfortable conversation with the roommate about his online behaviors, to be honest.
Push came to shove, and my girlfriend let me install the operating system of my choosing, since I would be the one supporting it.
We tried out Puppy Linux because it has good performance on older computers. That didn’t go so well. Getting wireless to work with ndiswrapper was a real pain in the neck in Puppy.
Eventually, I ended up settling on Linux Mint, and a few customizations later, the computer had an uncanny resemblance of the Windows XP operating system it replaced – “Start Menu,” Bliss background and everything. It was good enough to fool both roommates… they’ve NEVER mentioned a peep about any problems at all. As a test, I asked one of them (who were unaware of the switch) if they noticed any problems with the computer since I had been working on it.
“No problems at all, it’s been great. Ever since you changed it to Firefox it runs faster once it’s loaded up.”
I don’t even think they know they’re using Linux, to be honest.
There have been a few issues that presented themselves over the past two months after the switch, but they were minor cases of vendor lock in – both Blackberry and the iPhone don’t happily sync or upgrade firmware easily on Linux. Technically, it is possible to get them working. Are those righteous hacks usable by a mere mortal? No way in hell! So we ended up settling on a dual-boot scenario.
There have been a few issues other than the phone synchronizing, such as an Adobe Flash or “IE Only Website” render problem here and there, but other than those, nothing notable has come up in quite some time.
Overall, I’d say it’s been a success. These .exe files keep popping up on the desktop every once in awhile… but as the saying goes… No harm, no foul.
Addendum: She loves The GIMP, and has spent many hours playing klickety, which is an addictive bejeweled-ish color matching to clear the board game. Also, there seems to be a graphical driver issue where the computer seems a little bit sluggish. I think a video card change would fix that up nicely.
