I have been experimenting with Linux for several years and have been pleased by the progress Linux has made in that time. During the time that I have been experimenting with Linux, the Achilles heel has always been hardware support. When I first tried Linux the problem was with support for my Winmodem. More recently, the problem was with the Realtek 8187b wifi card in my Toshiba laptop. A few weeks ago I salvaged a Broadcom wifi card out of a dead computer and tried it in my Toshiba. Since then, Ubuntu 9.04 has been running very well.

In the last couple months I have had three friends experience serious hard drive failures. Of course they didn’t have backups of their critical data. One of the friends had hundreds of pictures of their daughter after a long and painstaking international adoption.