There gets to be a point in every girl geek’s life when she has to strike out of the Windows mold, and make trails into the unknown - i.e. Linux.

I had once traveled this path before. I first turned to Linux in the summer of 1999, spurred on by a fellow geek who piqued my interest in the Red Hat distro. He was minimalistic and text-based about the affair, and though I thought it looked easy from over his shoulder, soon my resolve was crushed and I ran back to the familiarity of Microsoft.

However, a few months ago my much beloved PC ceased to co-operate. The purchase of a new laptop seemed an opportune time to start anew, and thus Debian (Kernel 2.6 and KDE 3.2) was installed on my machine.

One of the first things I noticed was that it was not Windows. Well, duh, I hear you say - but seriously: you don’t realize how many little things you get used to with an operating system. Using Windows had become easy, ingrained and automatic. I knew keyboard shortcuts, the way I liked it to be setup and where to start for any unknown things.

Linux is different. It’s a paradigm shift - it’s not just a new or different version of Windows or Mac systems. It is an OS (actually, several systems, if you count each distro as a different OS) in its own right and with its own flavour.

General reasons to love Linux:

• Open source
• Free
• Well-supported
• Stable
• Virus-unfriendly

Applications
One of the first things to note here is that downloading and installing applications is very different (part of the paradigm shift mentioned earlier). Rather than downloading a zipped archive or executable file, you use a command called apt-get - one of the most useful and sensible things I have ever learnt to type. Say you want to install a browser - easy! Type apt-get firefox from the command line and hit enter - your computer will instantly begin to locate and connect to a suitable server and download what you need. Once this is complete, it will then ask you if you want to install with a simple [Y/N]? and you’re away. With this command in your arsenal, the sky is the limit - not to mention that if any of your new applications need further files, you can just apt-get those too!

At first I was unsure of how I would cope without my favourite applications - however, the open source community has looked this problem in the face and more than dealt with it. For just about any application you may be used to from using Windows, there is a Linux equivalent which may even be better than what you have used previously.

Browsers: Where once there was Internet Explorer or a Windows version of Firefox, now there is the Linux version of Firefox.

Mail clients: Where once there was Outlook Express or Thunderbird, now there is the Linux version of Thunderbird.

Graphics: Where once there was Photoshop, now there is The Gimp 2.0.

Chat/messengers: Where once there was Trillian or the individual AIM/ICQ/MSN applications, not there is the all encompassing GAIM.

…and the list goes on. It does take a little while to become oriented in new applications, as it would if you moved to a new type on a Windows platform.

The open source movement is really providing a viable alternative to commercial solutions - I fully recommend trying it for yourself!