Proclamation to the World #1

I, Chris Jensen, hereby declare Ubuntu Linux 8.04 to be inherently superior to Microsoft Windows in... every way but one. And the one failure of Ubuntu is not Ubuntu's fault. It is the fault of every single one of us for not using it.

I find I must go into more depth. You see, I built a computer for my brother for Christmas. It's a sweet rig and didn't cost me a fraction of what it would have to buy it prebuilt. Was a great project and I want to do it more often.

So now that we have two computers and a playstation in the house, I wanted to network them all together, or at the very least, connect them all to the internet simultaneously. I ended up buying a Linksys Router. Horribly expensive for the performance, but that can't be helped (well, it could have, but I was in a bit of a rush to get things set up.)

Our internet has been nothing but trouble since I hooked it up. We are dropping packets and losing data transfer all over the place. You can't even browse the internet because so many times a website will wait for a server to respond, but the information was simply lost because of something stupid. It was incredibly frustrating, seeing download speeds up to 1 Mbps from a direct connection, to 30 kbps with a routered connection.

I did a speed test with the router in Vista. 5000 kpbs download speed (eh, not bad) 61 kbps upload. For anyone reading who is not familiar with the terminology and relativity in data transfer speeds, let me just say that 61 kbps upload is about as pathetic as your old dial-up modem. I'm not paying for cable internet to get dial-up speeds. That's just ridiculous.

So, in my frustration, I decided to just reboot the computer and give it a rest. I missed my dual boot prompt, and it automatically booted Ubuntu. I figured, eh, what the heck, why not use it for awhile, see if I can get the internet to improve through that mess of foreign programming.

NOPE. NO PROGRAMMING.

Ubuntu autoMAGICALLY configured everything. My internet works perfectly, the chat room I moderate has a steadier connection, and the only hiccups are due to momentary blackouts in the router (which is pretty standard unless I were to install a homebrew firmware onto the router, which I'm not sure is necessary).

All of this is to simply say, everyone should use Linux. The only reason it isn't as popular as Windows or Mac is because it lacks a lot of support. You can't play high-end games with it and there are a few minor issues with things like Flash Player and Java. The more people that use Linux, the more developers will say, "Hey, there is a market available to us that would make us more money if we simply did a little work to port our software over to them!"

And best of all, most versions of Linux are free. Most software for Linux is free. Thinking about buying Microsoft Office? Don't bother. Open Office has nearly all of the same features (and some that Office doesn't have) and is completely free.