Year 5: Life Without Windows Part One

Hello welcome to my weblog. This is not at hate blog. I don't hate open or closed source. I don't hate WinXP nor OSX.

I started this site 5 years ago this today, to explain what GNU/Linux is.

GNU/Linux is freely available, and most are not required to register their copies with any central authority, so it is very difficult to know how many people use Linux to date. Could be as many as five million users. Yes, some free software can't stand up to some of the commercial alternatives, but most software on GNU costs nothing to use, and it's built by passionate developers who love what they do, and who usually get very little in return. I use Mozilla Firefox web browser, Banshee multimedia player (similar to Windows Media Player) and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite (the Linux equivalent to Microsoft Office, Word, Excel, etc.) are just three examples of free open-source programs found on Gnu/Linux systems.

There has been many changes in the last 5 years.

• Intel released open source software drivers for the newest generation Intel graphics , including support for 2D and 3D graphics features.
• Dell officially unveiled its three consumer systems the XPS 410n and Dimension E520n desktops, and the Inspiron E1505n notebook that come with the Ubuntu 7.04 Linux distribution factory installed.
• Android-Based T-Mobile G1 Hits Stores back in 2008. The G1 ran Android/Linux, Google's open source operating system, which was designed to bring the desktop computing experience to mobile devices. The release of the T-Mobile G2 will mark the two-year anniversary of Android availability in the U.S.
• AMD opened up their proprietary microcode drivers to the open source world and enabled open source developers to write hardware accelerated 3D drivers a day later for some Radeon cards.
• In 2009 one-third of the 35 million netbooks shiped was with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Gnu/Linux versus 68% Windows. This year there are tablets based on Android, which are Linux-based hitting the market, along with sophisticated tablets that will run Google’s upcoming Linux-based Chrome OS.
• Banshee a music manager and All-in-one media player which lets you rip, play, burn and share your digital music collection now supports loading the Amazon MP3 AMZ files for downloading audio that was purchased from within a web-browser session. The web-based Amazon rendering within Banshee is being done using WebKit.
• Nokia and Intel have become allies. In February 2010, Nokia and Intel announced the merger of Maemo and Moblin to create MeeGo, a Linux-based software platform designed to work across a range of hardware architectures and devices including mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, and in-vehicle systems.

2010 has been a rather interesting year for Linux, and 2011 promises to be even better. Linux share of the desktop market grew to 1.13 percent in May of this year. I believe the economy has been a major incentive for its adoption, with netbooks becoming increasingly popular. As low-powered and cheaper tablets become the norm, with alternative ARM-based chipsets instead of x86, systems like MeeGo are sure to be the winner due to there immense portability. Open source software is an idea whose time has finally come. It's breaking out into the commercial world, and that's changing the way we all use to think.

2005 seems like a life time ago. There were times I just did not have much to right about. However in that time Living without Windows becomes easier over time. Even now it still maintains its image of being a geek's operating system, hard to install and use but those things have been far from the truth for a long time.

It's all want to write for now. I did not want this to go on and on....