You don’t know what you’ve lost until its gone…

And then you find out that it was terrible.

I recently wiped my PC of Windows. It was a big call for me. I’ve been a long-time PC user and I generally don’t enjoy the Mac experience, but I’ve flirted with Linux before.

Initially, taking baby steps, I did a dual boot. But then I found out that I didn’t miss anything from Windows. At all. And I had that 32GB SSD on my laptop that was being used by Windows for emergency recovery and system restore of all things.

In fact, I really resented pressing the boot to anything but Ubuntu button in GRUB at all.

Now I run Linux from my SSD and boot times are lightening fast. It’s wonderful. I have my spinning 1TB disk serving all the big files via symbolic links to my home directory for analysis, media, etc, and everything works smooth as silk.

Sure, getting Linux working just the way you like it takes a bit more effort than point-and-click style OS’s, but I have this machine purring now, and I don’t know how I lived without a real command line this past half year. Honestly, wrestling Windows to work with the cutting-edge tools that you need for data processing is more work than we have time for.

The past 6 months has been hard work, and cut me into a more mature and open minded programmer as a result. But I’m now ready to rid myself of the hacky tools that you need to get Windows working with cloud services, big databases and parallel processing. It’s time to get real. And Linux is the platform for me.