Comment 873 for bug 1

Having been involved with IT for 30 years starting with IBM PC's & XT's and Apple Lisa's, ICL Mainframes running card punched Cobol programs, PICK and Prime Information and Universe, MS-Dos and Windows PC's, I finally decided to try and kick Microsoft out of my life and off my PC. Well nearly - I still need it for a few things as there is no acceptable options under Linux or the only supported platform is Windows or Mac, (thanks Australian Tax Office). So I use Sun's xVM VirtualBox.

I took the gamble and stepped up dived into Ubuntu and 8.10 and 64bit. I have put many many many hours into getting it to where now I think its an acceptable alternative, just re-fix Bluetooth !!! and its will be perfect.

However the effort has been large, so I am going to give it 3 months (??) and try and install the final stable release onto other laptop to see if its really an viable alternative to XP and Vista and all that that means.

Also I am not sure if the 'community' is as mature as it needs to be really break Microsoft's monopoly.

Does free = freedom? Not sure thats true. One definition of Freedom could be the right to chose from viable alternatives. Free is not always better and paying for well developed and supported software is not unethical.