Windows to Ubuntu

When my sons and I were assembling personal computers for our own use, and networking them, we needed additional copies of Windows 95. This was always a challenge to come up with additional licenses. When the move came to Windows 98 I bought five copies of the operating system at $100 each, which at the time was an onerous amount to pay. In the next few years my children began to use Linux on their own computers. I was using Windows 2000 Professional my son Steven had given to me that had been given to him by Microsoft in a programming competition.

When XP was released it was time to move to Linux. Not that XP was a rickety operating system, I was just growing tired of having to keep buying my operating system over and over. I didn’t want to have to upgrade the many Windows software applications I had bought over the years.

So I began, first with a dual boot machine, and over time converted 15 years of data for use with Ubuntu. I moved Word Perfect and Office files to Open Office; moved from Turbo Tax to online tax preparation; exported Personal Ancestral File GEDCOMs to PhpGedView; and so forth. I’m a big fan of Google Docs and use it a lot.

Once in the open source world, life gets easier. I have learned about high quality open source software and to use on-line applications through Firefox. Ubuntu has a new release every six months and it just gets easier to use after each iteration.