How it all began…

Hello reader ^^

So, a little about me: I’m a portuguese 19 year old girl who’s in college studying to become a nurse. I’m not a computers expert nor a developer. I mainly use my computer to make AMVs, watch anime, read manga, listen to music, access the internet, making avatars, headers, banners, signatures, etc.

About a year ago I was a Windows user. And I had never thought of changing, not even once – well that’s probably because I didn’t know of any options – my knowledge at the time was “Linux is for geeks who understand it and Mac is for rich people and I am neither”.

However I met a Linux user who used Ubuntu. He tried to convince me to change but I ignored him. Well, that was untill I saw the cube and the windows “shaking”. Yeh, it’s shameful but that is the true reason I dropped Windows – for “cool” shaking and cube effects.

And thus my adventure began :)

I installed Ubuntu 10.04, a dock (I don’t remember which but I think it was Advant Window Navigator [AWN for short]), compiz and I was ready to go.

Well sort of. Thing is – I didn’t have my Sony Vegas Pro anymore, how would I make videos? [I actually never made videos again because I haven’t found a Video Editor to convince me yet – maybe in time…]. I also couldn’t use Photoshop – what would become of me? :O

When I noticed this I really wanted to go back to Windows, which I did… for, like, 5 minutes. I asked myself – “what do you prefer? A crashing slow insecure OS or living without two apps?” and I went back to Ubuntu again x)

I adopted GIMP and I never used Photoshop again and I grew accustomed to Ubuntu more and more. Version 10.10 came out and I installed it. Great (I thought). …Untill I decided to install the netbook version.

Argh, how I hated it ;__; Even today, Unity makes me sick. I don’t care how better you think it is – on the netbook version it was slow as hell and I could never see it in front of me again. So I installed the regular Ubuntu 10.10 version.

All was good untill I heard that Ubuntu 11.04 would come with Unity. I lost all hope and decided to not update Ubuntu untill they realized they were making a mistake.

Linux user from before tried to convince me to update Ubuntu several times because I could start it without Unity. However, stubborn as I am, I told him I wouldn’t.

Meanwhile, he had already discovered Arch Linux. He tried to convince me to change but the lack of “user friendliness” compared to Ubuntu had me rejecting the idea.

However my Ubuntu seemed to be getting slower day by day and I was kind of sick of it too. Windows wasn’t even an option to me (I was already totally converted to Linux) so I started thinking of some options.

And one day, I was looking for linux desktops and I saw a screenshot which changed my life. This one:

When I saw the description in DeviantArt I realized he was using ArchLinux and Openbox. And I promised myself I’d have a desktop as beautiful as his. So I asked the previous linux user for help to install Arch and Openbox.

That was… five days ago. We spent a whole day trying to figure out Openbox and configuring conky and Openbox itself. I kept configuring my desktop but Openbox kept bugging me because of the Gnome Apps who looked like Win98 x.x

I was shown an XFCE desktop which I liked so, yesterday, I changed from Openbox to XFCE. Right now, I’m pretty satisfied although I’m still aiming for the most beautiful desktop ever and working towards it. This is my desktop right now:

I’ll post more infos on my current desktop later (such as the theme and the conky configuration and all) ^^

Suggestions are welcome ;)

June 15, 2011 | Categories: Arch Linux, Desktop | Tags: arch linux, change, desktop, openbox, Ubuntu, windows, xfce | Leave a comment