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When I bought my current tower PC a couple of years ago, I took my old PC, a Dell Dimension 4100, and moved it to the library room so that we could have a second desktop primarily for Charlotte. As little as she was at the time, she was still able to learn how to use the mouse, which let her play some simple games. Now that she's learning how to read and write, she's able to do more and enjoys playing games and visiting a few websites. She's not glued to the computer; it's just some other thing to play with once in a while.
Like the rest of us, though, the computer isn't getting any younger. While it seemed zippy when I bought it in 2000, it chugs along at an interminable pace now, particularly at boot time, and the demands of more recent software AND the media-rich websites kids like are outpacing older machines' specs. My thinking has been to consider buying a new computer for her use, and until recently I'd been pretty sure that I was going to buy a Mac Mini. Now, however, I'm about to go off into a different direction: I'm going to install Ubuntu on the PC she already has.
If you follow computer news at all, you probably know that the latest version of Ubuntu was released just a few days ago, and there's been quite a lot of excitement in the geek world about it. Of the myriad versions of Linux available in the marketplace, Ubuntu definitely has the "flavor of the day" buzz going for it, especially among the crowd who are promoting making Linux easy to use and accessible to the average computer user so that it might have some crumb of a chance to chip away at Windows' dominance of the PC desktop market.
So Ubuntu, along with many other Linux OSes, puts a nice graphical user interface on top of the arcane, command-line driven business of UNIX. It also has gone a long way toward making the installation and configuration of the operating system simpler and less aggravating than most Linux installs have been in the past, which makes technical users like me more likely to brave the process.
Most importantly, though, I have come to the belief that there's no longer any need to be shackled to Windows any more. Even though Linux has been around for a decade or so, and the Mac is even older than Windows, the simple reality of the PC world since the early 1990s has been the need to use Windows because of its dominant position. You simply could not expect to be able to use a non-Mac PC unless you ran Windows. I also think this continued to be true until a couple of years ago. Despite the evangelizing of the pro-Linux/anti-Microsoft crowd, Linux was not really suitable for widespread use by the garden variety user, nor was the universe of Open Source software. Now, I think we have reached the "tipping point" (to borrow from Malcolm Gladwell). Just this morning I read that Dell is going to start selling PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed, and that's on top of the recent news that they were going to bring back Windows XP pre-installs rather than force people to buy machines with Vista.
Having read quite a few "tricks-and-tips" websites, I don't expect the conversion to Ubuntu to be as simple as "follow the bouncing ball", but I remember all too well the struggles I used to face installing older verisons of Windows, and expect a similar degree of difficulty. That's okay, it's part of the challenge. The other challenge I know I'll face is the need to install WINE for the one or two software titles Charlotte has that will need a Windows environment to work.
If things go well, then I will probably take the leap myself and change my own machine over. My current PC is still quite adequate, and has enough horsepower to even get a little experimental and try running Beryl as my desktop.
I will probably post a bit about all of this as I start to undertake these projects. Stay tuned.
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