I stuck it out with MyCrudSoft till EOL for XP. After nearly 30 years with the Redmond curse hanging like a millstone around my neck - and 13 of those with XP itself - I decided; enough was enough!
I Googled 'Free alternative operating systems' two days after EOL.....and was absolutely blown away by what I found. I did some research into Linux; 300+ 'distros', almost all of which were completely free? Whoo-hoo!
I downloaded Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 'Trusty Tahr', wiped MyCrudSoft off my drives and out of my life, installed Ubuntu, and jumped into the Sea of Linux.....at the deep end! Oh, sure; there was a BIT of a learning curve. But it was nowhere near as bad as many people tried to make out, and it didn't take too long to surmount.
I guess I was lucky. I was never 'wedded' to Windows for anything work-related. Every job I'd ever had simply had no use for the things; hard to believe these days, but still very possible in the 80s & 90s. I worked for one firm for nearly 14 years, in the minerals-processing sector. The only person who used one was the guv'nor's secretary.....and she treated it with 'kid gloves', as though it might explode at any moment. The poor lass was freakin' terrified of the thing.....
So it was extremely easy for me to make the switch.
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I kept that Ubuntu install going for about 6 months, all the while 'hopping' around t'other distros, trying different things out. Then Canonical decided to drop support for my elderly Radeon GPU in one of their 'custom kernel upgrades'; this was the start of Shuttleworth's obsession with trying to make Ubuntu compete directly with Windoze on a level playing field. Drop support for old hardware, and concentrate on all the brand-new stuff. Totally contrary to general Linux practice.
Graphical glitches and total 'freeze-ups' became the order of the day. I soon got fed-up with that.
A mate on the Ubuntu Forums suggested I give Puppy Linux a try. Their newest build, based on Trusty - Tahrpup - had just been released. I tried it on ye anciente Inspiron lappie - a P4 and a gig of DDR1. It was the first Linux distro I'd tried that would boot to a working desktop OOTB. Everything else needed a ton of arcane kernel line incantations to make 'em work with the bizarre Intel 'Extreme' graphics, part of the 'Brookedale'-cored 82845 chipset. Intel tore the VESA rulebook up and chucked it out of the window when they built that thing. 'Twas a total bloody nightmare to work with.
I was so impressed with Pup that I wiped Ubuntu and installed Tahrpup on the big Compaq rig I had at the time. The graphics side of things calmed down immediately; Puppy has always stuck with more or less bog-standard kernels, without a load of idiotic compile-time switches being toggled-off. The rest, as they say, is history. I haven't looked back since.
Mike.
