Linux: I gave it a shot

I bought a new laptop for grad school this fall. Yes, I decided that the old beast just couldn't hack it anymore, so I turned it in for a new, battery-efficient, memory-upgraded model which doesn't shock or burn me. I partitioned the hard drive and experimented first with Ubuntu's operating system.

There were numerous features which I absolutely love about Ubuntu. From the free open source programs which already come preloaded, to the desktop animations which make windows look like child's play, there are so many fun modifications you can make to personalize the operation and design of your computer. Adding new programs is a simple task: choose the ones you want from a list (or find others online, copy the address) and BAM! they're installed.

For all that I loved about Ubuntu (and other linux os programs I tried), there are many things which Windows has which cannot be replicated. For every hardware hiccup I experienced with Ubuntu, there were countless lines of code which had to be used to reconfigure or add or update or whatever to make it work with the OS. It really got to be a pain when there was no fix for my energy-saving hard drive which parked consistently every 10 seconds under Ubuntu - to fix it, I had to re-configure the hard drive every time I booted up ... a real pain. Another thing which kept me from fully converting was the battery life while using Ubuntu. I followed every tutorial about cutting the screen brightness, cutting CPU power, etc., only to find the max battery life of my 8+ hour battery to be consistently 4 hours. My machine was made for Windows, and the battery maximization is incredible and linux just can't compete with that.

So that gets me to what I really wanted to talk about: Open Office. Long ago, I heard about Open Office from a roommate who was too cheap to buy the real deal Office. I sympathized with his plight to convert documents back and forth from .odt to .docx or whichever, and swore I would never use Open Office. Then I installed linux and didn't want to go through the hassle of installing an emulator to run Windows programs through linux (plus I couldn't find my product key for Office ...). So I gave it a shot. Honestly, the Open Office Writer I used (3.0) seemed to be very functional and decently consistent when transferring to someone else's Word program. Sometimes tables and graphs would randomly not appear, though, and I would get rather annoyed. The kicker was the fact that my machine kept freezing up when writer was used - so then I went to the wordpad program, still holding on to that "free" mentality. The wordpad is good for taking notes, but that's about it.

But even with the problems I had with Writer, the real kicker for booting Open Office was when I had some statistical analysis that I needed to run. Thinking that Open Office Calc had been (thus far) a worthy competitor to Microsoft's Excel, I naively showed up to our group meeting thinking I held in my hand the power to compute simple descriptive statistics. Little did I know how wrong I was. After searching the internet fruitlessly for half an hour, I found that there really is no good add-in for doing statistics with Calc. And I really didn't want to take the time to find an unfamiliar open source statistical analysis program ... so I decided that night that I would spend the $60 to buy Office Ultimate (again, since my old computer had crashed with the blue screen of death in the midst of all of this and I had to reinstall Windows!).

Never has such a meager $60 (major $60 for a young, college-going couple) been such a relief. I now am saving files in the same format as everyone in my group. I no longer have to create ultra-simple presentations in Open Office Impress which can't possibly be screwed up in transferring them to Powerpoint. I now use Outlook (which runs circles around Mozilla's Thunderbird email client). I now have Data Analysis for Excel which can provide me with those statistics I need. I have Access, OneNote, Publisher, and more ... I feel like I'm home again! It's a strange feeling to want to come back to Windows and Office, but I feel like my energy now can be focused on doing actual work, not just background work trying to get Ubuntu and open source products to do what I need them to.

For what they are, the free linux operating systems I tried were great. They were free, sometimes simple, and sometimes creative. For what Windows is, its not great all the time, and yes, I still crash fairly often ... but "It's the world I know" and that's a good feeling.