I’m a tech- and gadget-phile, but I’m not really tech-savvy; I just want my shit to work. So when a generalized dislike of Microsoft and insufficient funds for a new Apple laptop combined to inspire me to get a netbook with the Ubuntu version of open-source operating system Linux pre-installed, I found myself drowning in system hang-ups, compatibility issues and other problems.
(If you understood less than 25 percent of that last sentence, don’t worry about it. I wouldn’t have either before this whole fiasco. Go read something else, today I’m recommending Florida Sportsman or anything by Vonnegut.)
It’s not that Linux is a bad alternative to Windows or OS X. It’s just that, to me, it seems designed more for die-hard computer lovers who like to tinker, customize and innovate endlessly. I don’t want to tinker, customize or innovate. I want to connect to my home’s wifi network, see images and videos on the websites I visit, hear sounds, and get my documents to look the way I want ’em, all of which were either hard or impossible to do via the version of Ubuntu that came installed on my Dell Mini 12, and various other versions of Linux that I tried. (To be fair, Dell screwed the pooch by using some obscure hardware that isn’t properly supported by Linux, then went ahead and put the software that didn’t support it on the damn machine.)