mac, PC, Linux

It wasn't until I reformatted my laptop and installed Ubuntu that I realized how little of my computer use is "local," i.e. entirely on my PC.

Sure, I have my music and pictures, but I don't use them every day. There are PDF documents; handy and useful, but not typically accessed on a daily basis. And there are the spreadsheets for the budget, water & energy consumption, and for medication refill dates & cost. Those I use every day. But most of what I do is online.

For the spreadsheets I use LibreOffice. I haven't used Microsoft Office since about 2002. I got sick of dealing with licensing issues for software I had paid for, and moved to OpenOffice.org. Last year LibreOffice forked off from OpenOffice.org and I went along with it. Oracle had acquired OpenOffice.org and it was stagnating.

Anyway, my point is that it was easy to migrate to Linux because LibreOffice comes standard.

And for the Internet I use Firefox, have been since before it was called Firefox; it is also standard issue in Linux. I exported all of my bookmarks and passwords from Windows XP before installing Ubuntu and imported them after the installation, so I had a basically seamless online experience.

The overall daily difference between Windows and Linux, for me, boils down to maintenance and performance.

My computer is still ancient - but since I don't have over 200MB of anti-virus software constantly running, a greater quantity of system resources is available for surfing the Web, watching videos and running spreadsheets.

And, without concerns about viruses, I don't need to spend a lot of time updating virus signatures and scanning downloaded files.