Don't Insult the Man with the Rope

… or why all my readers should run a flavor of Linux.

I spent the better part of last night putting a new installation of Windows XP on a computer that my other half’s nephew owns — the hard drive had fried rather badly and I replaced it. No big deal, I’ve done this a thousand times.

Well… after getting all the requisites installed (anti-virus, Firefox, Office, etc.), I let the computer run overnight with updates. I woke up this morning to put the next OS on it (yes, this particular 7 year old dual boots Windows XP and Ubuntu [a flavor of Linux]) only to discover that, overnight, Windows had contracted a virus.

That’s right, in the course of approximately 12 hours from installation, Windows XP had already been infected with a rather nasty virus. Thankfully, it was picked up fairly quickly (AVG hadn’t yet performed its daily scan) BUT the fact that it had gotten infected simply by being on… well… wow. That’s just freaking sad. This computer hasn’t even been used to surf the web yet!

This is why I love running a version of Linux. I don’t get viruses, and everything I need comes installed right out of the box… well, okay, there’s a few exceptions, but that’s not all that hard to change thanks to the Ubuntu Software Center.

Anyway, I must point out one other thing: when a 7-year-old with ADHD can operate a Linux-based computer (i.e. Ubuntu), I think that just about anyone can.