When I built my current PC late last year, I made a decision to not spend another couple of hundred dollars on buying Windows XP for it. Instead, I made the machine run on Ubuntu linux. How is it going? Just fine. In the post from December 26 linked above, I listed the things I can do on this box that I could also do on windows, like use Rhythmbox for mp3 playback and podcast subscriptions, and getting things on and off my PDA. All of that still works, but I still haven’t really looked at getting Avantgo to update.

Another thing I missed from windows was having a monitor program for Folding@Home, a distributed computing project looking to find how proteins don’t form, or fold, correctly, and the causes of various diseases related to it. On windows I used Electron Microscope III, which had a nice graphical display of how far along each frame was from completion, and the number of points per day were being produced.

Prior to finding another program, I had to check the log files produced by each client (I’m running two, since it’s a dual core machine). Now, the program FahMon has come to my aid, showing the progress of each unit, estimated time to completion and a handy benchmarking tool, showing how many points per day are produced for each unit.

I am really quite enjoying using Ubuntu on this machine - although I have used linux for a few years now, the distro I used (and still have, as a dual-boot option) on the old PC was gentoo. I found I was devoting a large portion of my time to administrating and maintaining the OS itself - visiting the forums, looking for fixes to things that may have broken during an update, or just general tweaking. And since it is source-based, new or updated software involved compiling. I shudder to think about having a look at what needs updating now on the machine - it would probably be a week solid of compilation time required.

On this new PC, however, I hardly have to do anything. New software is installed from a binary format, so no compilation is needed. Updates have (so far) just worked, without breaking things. I can get on with just using the machine. Sure, it is probably a few percent slower than if I ran gentoo, but it is really not noticeable.

I enjoy not having any viruses to worry about, nor spyware. I have a software firewall set up, and am also behind a hardware firewall/router, so the machine is fairly secure.

Do I think I will end up installing Vista? Not for quite a while, I’d say. It depends on if something were developed, some killer app, that ran on windows and windows only. More likely it will be some Digital Rights Management, copy protection scheme that will render the box unusable for half the internet or something. Even then, I would definitely retain the linux install and dual-boot the machine. Buying Windows Vista would be something that is at least a year or two off for me. That’s my prediction at the moment, anyway. Besides, I’d need another Gig of memory, just to do the same things I’m doing now with one in linux.