Kudos to all the developers who made Karmic Koala possible

[Dave Walker]

Greetings,

Since the 1990s I have developed a love-hate relationship with Microsoft
products.  Their instability and poor performance has made me wealthy.  My
clients demand their products and I am paid lots of money to keep them
running.  If they didn't switch to a Mac then they had no choice but to
depend on me.

In my personal life I have hoped for years that some alternative would
arrive.  Something I could install and use without feeling like I was giving
up some functionality.   I would fire up the various LiveCDs and always find
one problem or another.   My digital camera wouldn't mount.. my computer
would go into standby but never return.. poor vpn implementation preventing
me from connecting to my client's networks..  printers that would only
occasionally work.. hours with xorg.conf trying to get some esoteric
multi-monitor configuration working properly.. etc.. etc...  One time I
fired up a LiveCD and it wiped an entire hard disk!   That was scary..
forcing me back to Windows XP..

A couple of days ago I decided it was time to join the modern world and
upgrade to Windows 7.  I logged into my TechNet account and downloaded the
DVD.  At the same time I decided to download Karmic Koala because I saw a
post on Digg that it had been released so I wanted to try.. try again.   I
swapped my XP drive for a blank one, plugged in the CD, installed Karmic and
rebooted.

Wow...

- My dual monitor setup?   Just a few clicks in the NVidia XServer Settings
utility, click APPLY, dual monitors!
- My Nikon D60?  Mounted!   Oh.. and not just one interface either.. 2!   I
can use GPhoto2 from the command line or F-Spot from the GUI.
- My printer worked right out of the box.  Seriously.  I turned it on.  I
printed.
- Blackberry backup?  Check.   MP3 player?  Check.   VirtualBox with 3D
support?  Check.  VPN?  Check.
- Suspend mode actually suspends!   and returns!

The only thing missing is Linksys QuickVPN.   On the off chance I need it..
wow.. VirtualBox is a beautiful thing.

The last couple of days have been spent migrating files and folders from my
XP partition, installing applications and tweaking the configuration.   The
machine has not crashed once.  It is fast and responsive.  Everything just
works.  KDE 4.2 is so beautiful.  Debian is so stable.  No driver disks.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who made Karmic
Koala possible!   As a child of the 80s..  this is the first time in a very
long time where I had a real choice.  If this is the product being released
next to Windows 7 then Microsoft better get moving otherwise this is just
the first nail in their coffin.

Oh.. and my girlfriend says she's switching too.   :-)
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