An article about a guy who one day after some blue screens of death and issues with Outlook installed Ubuntu on his company laptop. He happily coexisted with a 1000+ windows users in his company. I did the same for the last couple of years at a big (40.000+, not that the number matters) company until I quit that company at the end of last year. I was quite happy to make the switch to Ubuntu and it made my development work a lot more fun and less stressful.

He still had to use some Windows software on his laptop though, Visio and IE. I didn’t put any Windows software on my pc. I did use a crappy hour registration web application however on a windows pc though as firefox doesn’t support active-x.

The project I was working consisted of a Java web application of 3000+ classes. We used Maven, Oracle OC4J, Jetbrains Idea (well, some used Eclipse) and CVS NT. It was a mixed group, some were on Windows XP, some on Linux, mostly Ubuntu. By being careful with paths we made it possible to build the software on both platforms. Documents were in Word-format, but I never experienced any problems with reading and editing Word documents in Open Office. Word users didn’t seem to notice I was using Open Office for my documents.

Of course I lost support for the pc I was working on after installing Ubuntu, which was fine with me. I maintained the system myself.

Nice to read he didn’t have any problems either.