Learn Ubuntu with Hackett and Bankwell
I’ve been a GNU/Linux user for about a decade now. I started seriously using it back in the wild days of Red Hat 5.2, although I did have that “experiment” with that stack of Slackware floppies, but I won’t really count that. Back then, GNU/Linux absolutely deserved a lot of the criticisms it received: it was hard to use, it was a pain to configure, and interoperability with more mainstream protocols and file formats was a crap shoot at best. In the years since, I’ve rubbed shoulders with Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, and Jon ‘maddog’ Hall. I’ve read “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. I’ve written numerous technical how-tos, and presented at my local LUG.
There was a time when “selling” new users on GNU/Linux was a somewhat arduous task. It required a substantial commitment of time and energy. Now, thanks largely to Ubuntu, it’s dead simple to get someone to try GNU/Linux, and it’s a non-destructive process, to boot! The larger Free Software ecosystem has matured sufficiently that there’s a wealth of terrific, stable, useful software available to satisfy most users’ needs.
