[K12OSN] Linux cut off

[Bill Kendrick]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2004 at 12:45:38PM -0500, KJ wrote:
> Hey Terrell,
> Not touching a Win32 app, that is fantastic!!! 
> 
> Do you have any pearls of wisdom for those of us who endeavor to get to 
> that spot in life?

In my personal and work life, up until a year ago, I hadn't touched
Windows since 1998.  My job at the time was converting WordPerfect docs
to FrontPage at the local sheriff's dept, and obviously we used Win95
for that.  I didn't have a 'modern' PC of my own at the time, so I used the
SunOS systems and Macs at my college, and my roommate's horrid Win95 box
at home.

When I graduated, and finally bought my own PC (a Pentium 133, which was
not exactly top-of-the-line, even back in '98) and installed Linux on it
immediately, and went from there.  I had a number of 'telecommute' web
development jobs, and not only was I able to do my work via my Linux system
at home, but I was accessing Linux and Unix servers where the content lived.

Then between 2000 and 2002, I worked at (MCI)/WorldCOM in Sacramento, and
there was a lot of Linux on the desktop there, for some reason, so I kept
using Linux at work, which was great.

Sadly, though I love my job and it's in the field I've been wanting to
get into (cellphone game development), due to the development and testing
tools all being for Windows (at the moment), I'm stuck using WinXP at work.
Honestly, it hasn't come very far since Win95.  Fortunately, I've lost
very little work, but it still does bluescreen, or worse yet, 'black screen'
(e.g., completely reboot without even blinking) on occasion. >:^(

In the meantime, my Linux boxes at home, and my one colocated webserver
have uptimes in the 100s of days. :^)


To add to my own story, my dad is now using Linux at home for email, web
browsing, and letter writing.  (He had a Mac OS 8 system before that was
getting quite rickety.)  And my wife uses only Linux on her desktop and laptop.

Anyway, just a little anecdote about how we can live, for the most part,
without Windows... even the non-uber-geeks. ;^)

-bill!
(who's waiting for the Linux cellphones to continue taking off so he can
start doing _Linux_ cellphone game development >;^) )