johnmccollum.co.uk

As I mentioned before, I made the switch to GNU/Linux at home some time ago. I talked about the benefits it brought me in terms of PC performance and productivity.

But at work, I’m still firmly rooted in the Windows camp. Why? Primarily because my job involves developing web sites and apps.

Tracking browser usage is a notoriously haphazard affair. According to the much-quoted W3C schools statistics, roughly 53% of users are using Internet Explorer. According to wikipedia, that number is nearly 75%.

Given internet explorer’s ‘unusual’ implementation of web standards - not to mention its market share - it is a necessity to test on these browsers. This is where things get a bit tricky for users of minority operating systems such as Linux, or OSX.

Sure, there are services such as Browsershots which take snapshots of sites using particular browsers, but if you’re anything like me, developing for IE is an iterative process. Make a change, hit refresh. Make a change, hit refresh. Waiting 3-30 minutes to see an update isn’t an option!

I’d be interested to hear comments from anyone who has found a way round this issue.

I was half expecting this post to detail the difficulties I was experiencing getting my printer and tablet to work in Ubuntu, having heard that the process could be troublesome. My experience turned out to be much better!

In fact, to my surprise, the whole set up experience was much easier than in Windows. The phrase ‘plug and play’ is bandied about all too often, but that’s exactly how it was for me in Ubuntu.

I plugged them into the USB port, and they worked, straight away. No messing about with drivers, and no configuration apart from clicking a few boxes for the printer. (On a dialogue box that automatically popped up.)

All of which is fantastic from the point of view of a user; not so great when I was hoping to have something to write about from the experience!

Onwards to the Ipod now. Maybe I’ll have something to complain about after that.

I started my PC experience as a Mac user sometime around 1990, I guess. Having a parent in the education sector, it was the only choice really! My first Mac was the Performa 400, a monster PC with a 40MB hard drive and 4 MB RAM.

I remained a devoted Mac geek until just before the first iMac came out; about 1998. The lure of PC gaming got too much for me, and I moved to a Windows based PC.

I’ve been a loyal Windows fan (yes, we do exist!) until about a week ago, when I made the move to Linux. Ubuntu, to be exact.

I had always liked Windows - to the point of getting really annoyed about Linux enthusiasts on Digg. Even though other, cooler, web developers had long since moved on, I held steadfast in my Windows resolve. I always had a soft spot for asp.net, despite the vast majority of my work being PHP related. So what changed?

My previously athletic PC had gradually slowed to a near stop. I kid you not, it now takes around 15 minutes before my PC starts behaving itself after a Windows startup! I figured I had nothing to lose - if this failed, it was probably time for a new PC anyway.

What a difference with Ubuntu. Despite having every bit of eye candy switched on (wobbly windows, desktop cube…the lot), my knackered old PC runs like a dream. It just does everything I ask it to do, immediately. There is no learning curve as such - my only minor irritation being a troublesome install of Apache / PHP. In the end, though, I have to concede that it was my fault, not Ubuntus.

My old PC has been given a new lease of life.

Thank you, Ubuntu!