Bored with Ubuntu is a Good Thing

I never cease to be amazed at how many interesting things I had to do with my Windows PC that I no longer am able to spend time on now that I run Linux.

I used to spend considerable time defragmenting my hard drive to increase the speed that Windows would run at. In Linux, there is no need to defragment, and in fact they don't even make a defragmenter, because the filesystem uses disk space more efficiently and doesn't degrade.

I used to run virus scans, and every now and then some attachment would contain a virus and I would have to react like an emergency response administrator to quarantine it, find out what evil it could have reaked on my system, and clean it out. Now, I don't even have a virus scanner.

I used to sit around salivating over new hardware - more RAM, better video card, better motherboard... now I don't spend time on that any longer. The CoreDuo2 processors I have running at 2.66 ghz never seem to be challenged by Linux. The 2 GB of ram I installed for Vista? I've never used more than 300 MB of it so far with ten applications running at once. My bottom of the barrel 8500 GT graphics card runs all of the Linux 3D games I could want faster than my XP box did. My hard drive is 300GB. Under Vista, I had used 150 GB of that space. I copied my personal files over to Ubuntu, and I have 260 GB free.

I could have installed this operating system on my computer from five years ago and it would have run just fine.

All of the magazine articles I used to read about how to clean off spyware or find an update to handle some operating system problem - GONE!

I used to spend 45 mins backing up my critical files to a USB key. Uh oh. Linux does the file copying ten times faster than Windows. It's done before I can finish making myself a sandwich.

I decided to search the web for a way to upgrade to the latest Firefox 3 beta 3. I would install some new, beta software, and surely that would throw my system into chaos. But it turns out that I just turned on a checkbox, pushed a button, copied a single line, ran it in the terminal window, and then unchecked the box and restarted Firefox. I didn't even ever have a file on my desktop. That's so boring!!!

What the heck am I supposed to do? I used to spend all of my time making my operating system function efficiently. Now, I sit down, browse the web, work on a project, and log out, and then I sit around feeling like there is something missing.

I just read through the articles on MaximumPC, PC World, PC Magazine... nothing. None of their guidance or advice on tweaking my system applies. My system is so lean and running so smooth that it doesn't need any tweaking. It's lightning fast.

I thought I might change up the icons the system uses and get rid of the default brown theme. Three minutes after I opened up the theme browser and clicked a different theme - I was done and left with nothing to do.

Frankly, Ubuntu Linux has left me feeling as though I am not getting everything out of my PC experience that I could be getting.