A couple of years into my IT studies and I came across Ubuntu 6, tried it and immediately got hooked. I tried many flavours of Linux and at some stage sported over 10 partitions on my laptop but finally settled back to Ubuntu Linux.
I had been divorced a few years earlier, had a lot of time on my own and Linux came as a heaven-sent to take my mind off the blues I still had.
Dark thoughts had been on my mind but Linux saved my life!
Here was a field of important technology that I could immerse myself in. Here I could see the workings of a computer without the restrictions of patents and secrecy. There are many Tux lovers who helped me via forums to overcome bugs and other problems and now I'm able to help others. I feel that by using one of the Linux distros I'm privileged to be a member of a very important brother/sister-hood.
I have only a ten year old laptop. With the demand of today's software, example: firefox takes a third of my RAM, it has become very frustrating. In spite of many challenges I march on and keep on tweaking.
Now I use Ubuntu 12.04 run like Lucid by using gnome-fallback and even using some Lucid packages.
The top gnome-panel acts like a monitor for cpu%, temperature, net-speed, keyboard switch, time, date and more while Cairo-Dock makes the most used programs available at the Mac-like bar at the bottom.
Conky, the life desktop background integrated monitor shows me important activity and usages and even the weather forecast.
A tweaked clock to suit the dark theme and calendar screenlet add a sense of time to the desktop which I otherwise loose and get dates mixed up.
Compiz looks after using a gentle and impressive way to open and shut windows; no sudden pop-ups to stir up my quiet and peaceful existence. Emerald, yes it still exists and gets maintained, allows me to tweak the window frames to my likings and to suit the current theme.
I love Linux and I use the other, commercial OS only occasionally as I can do just about everything on Linux.
This is a guest post by Rolf Sommerhalder, which won a prize in the joint contest of Linux notes from DarkDuck and Zinio.
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