Last night I decided to upgrade to the latest distro of the CrunchBang variant of Ubuntu, 9.04 (”Jaunty Jackalope”), on my Dell laptop. It took about 20 minutes to install, with 1 reboot necessary. Downloading updates took less than 5 minutes. So in under 25 minutes, I had a fully-functioning OS, less than 2 GB in size, and complete with a great suite of free apps for Web surfing, image editing, creating docs, communicating — the whole works.

Compare that with my recent Windows 7 installation, which took an hour, plus 2 reboots, and was stripped down, apps-wise. I had to install most of the apps that came pre-included with CrunchBang.

I knows Linux gets a bad rap for user-friendliness. Heck, I’ve even grouched about it. But it’s gotten a lot better in the last year or year-and-a-half. And if it weren’t for Linux, my circa-2002 Dell Inspiron 1100 would have been tossed in the dumpster long ago. It couldn’t even run Windows XP properly.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on July 15, 2009 - 8:18 am

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