I was having fun trying to get my programs to work under linux untill I realized that the things that I coudln’t get working were just not going to work. Among the various things I was struggling with was trying to get my mouse to work properly. I am used to a mouse with buttons on the left and right side that you can use to go ‘back’ or ‘forward’ in firefox or explorer or what have you. For some reason, in Linux, they were configured to ‘copy’ (instead of ‘back’) and ‘right click’ instead of ‘forward.’ The Ubuntu user forums were pretty helpful in explaining what I had to do: Edit some file in /etc/X11/ and then restart the X Windows system. I tried that, and when I restarted it didn’t work and was giving me a text only mode. I had no idea how to fix this; I realized that I probably should have backed up whatever file it was that I had edited, but at this point I was fed up with trying to get all of this stupid crap working in linux. The finance program couldn’t read my Quicken data files, the ipod-interface program would not use aac files, and the music player program wouldn’t play mp3’s.
I don’t want to fight my computer. I just want to use the damn thing. I can see why linux enthusiasts like the operating system, and if i had grown up using it maybe i’d stick with it or something, but windows really works pretty much just fine for me.