Enterprise Initiatives

I have many colleagues and friends who have been through messy divorces. In each case, these poor guys have gone from having the good life, to having issues, to losing half of their assets (or more). I just filed my divorce papers for Microsoft's Vista. In my case, my relationship with Vista never went through the good life period. I gave up half of my assets to "live" with Vista (memory, CPU, performance, costs). But when I split up with Vista, I got it all back!

With all jokes aside, I recently posted my positive experience of installing Kubuntu on an old 1.7GHz machine that was taking 10 minutes to boot up XP. The registry was beyond repair and the various programs like Spybot, Adaware, PitStop, Defrag, and many others did little to improve performance. The desktop was destined for the dumpster. Enter Kubuntu and this PC now works like a champ. I installed Wine on it and got IE 6.0 running on it for those foolish websites that target only the Microsoft browser. My daughter plays various Flash enabled games on Club Penguin. On my brand new Dell Inspiron 1721 laptop running Vista, these games take almost a minute to launch. On my old clunker PC w/only 256MB of Ram it loads in about 3 -5 seconds. That got me thinking.....how would this site perform on my new laptop under Linux?

So I installed Mepis 64 bit on my laptop and wiped out Vista. My daughter launched her game and it loaded instantly. Her exact words were, "Wow, this is so fast". My response was "Good Bye Vista!". So let's take the religion out of this discussion and talk about the investment I just made on my hardware. I bought two brand new identical laptops for $1000 each. These laptops have a Dual-core 64 bit processor with a Gig of memory. Now the Microsoft fanatics would cry, "why would you buy a laptop with only a Gig of memory?" My answer is, my budget doesn't allow for laptops that cost $2K-$3K and the main usage of these laptops are web browsing, email, and word processing. None of those functions require a ton of computer resources. I also have a monster machine (Dell XPS gaming machine) for all of our intense gaming needs (Battlefield 2, Civilization IV, Age of Empires, etc.). So two laptops for $2000 dollars was what I was willing to spend. Unfortunately, Dell did not offer XP or Linux on these machines. The cost of Vista is about $300. So 30% of the cost of my laptops was for an operating system that drained 50% of my resources and performed poorly.

I am not a financial analyst, but that is not a good spend of money. Now that I have eliminated Vista from the equation, I get a better ROI on my investment, even after acknowledging that I threw away $300 worth of software. As I mentioned in a post called Vista - What were they thinking, my wife dislikes Vista so much that she refuses to use the new laptop that I bought her for her birthday (due to it's poor performance). Now she is happy with the laptop running Mepis and the old clunker running Kubuntu.

My plan now is to move all of our computers except the gaming machine to Linux. The gaming machine will stay on XP while the laptops will leverage Wine and virtual machines for those Windows centric programs that won't run on Linux. I will install various Linux distributions and allow for the user to select from a list of distributions when booting the system. Eventually we will probably settle on a distribution like Kubuntu of Freespire that has an interface similar to Windows for an easy transition.

From Kubuntu