My parents were in town to see their grandchildren get baptized. Well my dad brought me a desktop to check out. This desktop was originally running Windows XP. It has a socket 478 Pentium 4 in it and my dad was hoping to be able to put either Windows 7 or 8.1 on it.
After multiple tries, it kept erroring out on the install. When attempting to install Windows 7, it kept spitting out an error asking for a device driver. I attempted to load all of the drivers from the motherboard and since I was trying to load from a usb drive, I also attempted a work around by unplugging and pluggin the usb drive into another usb slot. All to no avail. When I attempted to install Windows 8 it would error out with error codes. After googling the error codes, essentially the error codes led me to find out that the socket 478 probably would not work with Windows 8.
Enter Ubuntu. Since I have moved to the public cloud team at work, I have had to get more familiar with Linux. At home, I moved my laptop to Ubuntu Mate. I have not had many issues with it and it has software that were equivalent to what I had installed when my laptop was running Windows.
So I loaded up Ubuntu Mate on Monday night. It took me longer to download the iso than it took to install it as well as all of the codecs and applications that would make the transition for my dad a lot easier. Why can’t Microsoft do something just as similar? Who knows maybe they will get there someday. Probably about the same time that they make their OS backward compatible to older hardware.
So even though I have multiple Microsoft certifications and have supported Windows for many years. I find myself thinking why should I use Windows? They took away the TechNet subscription, which I would have continued to purchase, year after year to use in my home lab. I am not about to spend thousands of dollars to purchase a MSDN account so now I am left looking elsewhere. So Ubuntu makes a lot of sense for me. And now I have spread it to my dad.
