I finally did it. After putting up with years of sniggers and snide remarks from every time she runs a defrag or an anti-virus checkon her ageing Windows XP machine (I didn’t need to say ageing there, I guess) Mrs finally succumbed and moved to Linux.

The trigger was that I upgraded my machine, which was just as ancient but I’d been running Ubuntu on it for years, more lately I’ve been running Xubuntu, which is basically the same thing but with a different UI layer. It’s lighter and suits the old machine a little better, plus I’m not a fan of the Unity interface on Ubuntu. My new machine would handle the extra load of Unity no problem, but I still prefer the Xubuntu UI. It is interesting that we get this choice with Linux.

So, with me sporting a newer, faster machine Mrs realised just how old and crappy her machine was getting. Little things like some of the keys playing up, the fact it tends to crash if we pull the power supply even though the battery is just fine, and so on.

But, of course, she knew if she went from XP to Win8, which is what the new machines come with, it would be all so different to get used to she might as well switch to some Linux variant. I got the machine about a week ago, installed Lubuntu (another variation of Ubuntu, but this one has an even lighter UI and it feels more like WinXP to make it easier).

When I do this I pop the hard drive and put a new one in. That way I can switch back in a moment if there are any warranty problems. I don’t mess about with dual booting. If you’re going to switch then switch, dammit. There were some minor issues with getting the machine to boot off the replacement drive, nothing much there. The job could have been done in a couple of hours all up but I needed to find a quiet point in her schedule to switch over.

That happened yesterday. She has one rarely used thing on VirtualBox running WinXP, another couple of things on Wine, both of them infequently used, and the rest is mostly LibreOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird. She’s had one glitch in LibreOffice relating to the behaviour of quotes which took 5 minutes on Google to sort out.

Otherwise she’s all good. And no more defrags and virus checks. The keys all work too, though there’s a different keyboard to get used to.