Here are some thoughts on Xandros.

January 2001. I'd completed my service as a Peace Corps volunteer in the dry mountains north of Estelí a year previous, and returned to Nicaragua from a brief shopping trip to the States with a Compaq laptop running Windows 98 SE, a 12 string guitar, and a whole lot of enthusiasm for a modern lifestyle in Nicaragua's unassuming capital. The Internet had become huge in the quiet years I'd spent in the mountains. I'd been essentially glad to give technology - computers, specifically - a miss in all that time, but after such a prolongued drought of information and intellectual stimulation I was thrilled to be able to connect to the Internet and feel my horizons expand.

Chalk me up as another satisfied Ubuntu user. Kubuntu, really, which is Ubuntu with the KDE desktop in lieu of Gnome. That's an important distinction, as far as I'm concerned: when I first abandoned SUSE and was looking around for a new distro, I checked out Ubuntu and rejected it because I simply prefer KDE over Gnome. It's not religious to me, the KDE desktop just fits the way I work, and that means a lot. So when I heard about Kubuntu, I was excited to give it a try, and after a couple of days tinkering with the live distro, I made the decision to install. And no regrets! The following comments apply to Breezy Badger, the second official release.

People like me keep Microsoft's upper management awake at night: In 2000 I bought a new laptop, which came preloaded with Windows 98 and Microsoft Works. I paid around $400 more for a copy of Office 2000 Premium (with Front Page, Access, and Photodraw in addition to the regular suite of office programs). Windows did everything I wanted it to do, and I had no reason to change operating systems. Instead, one year later, I reformatted my hard drive, installed Linux, and liked it. I found Linux to be powerful, stable, inexpensive, and a lot of fun. There are still times when I revert to Windows to accomplish a specific task, but those occasions are less and less frequent and I'm now looking forward to the day when I can do away with Windows on my computer entirely. Here's why I made the change to Linux, why I don't regret it, and a whole lot of links, in case you're asking yourself the same questions about Linux I was (updated 14 Feb 2006) :