As some of you might know, I always have been a defender of Microsoft (especially Windows Vista and Word). As i don’t wanna raise a discussion here about wether this sympathy makes sense or not, i leave this without any further comments and ask you to do so as well.

But recently i’ve started to use more and more open source software without really taking notice of it. Actually it already started in June 2006 with my first blog post using wordpress. Lately the G1 with it’s open source operating system Android was the second major step.

Obviously the next major step is to change from my windows vista to an open source operating system for my personal laptop. To prevent myself from ending up with a non working laptop (imagine that!!) I try to plan this step a bit in advance. So what’s the best to start with?

  • Select an open source operating system you wanna go for

This is a decision everyone has to make for himself. There are heaps of OS out there. The most favourite ones are openSUSE, Debian and Ubuntu. My personal favourite is Ubuntu using Gnome as GUI. Now you might wanna go off and install the OS directly. But i recommend to look for your top software tools you use on your existing operating system.

  • Find matching open source software for your favourite software tools

My personal list looks like this:

  1. Skype: There is a Linux version available right here
  2. MS Outlook: The most appropriate alternative would be Evolution. Of course you could go for Thunderbird, but that doesn’t come with a calendar. So you might have to use Lightning as well and i prefere the “all-in-one” solution Evolution offers
  3. Firefox: Well, just keep it :)
  4. Picasa: This is available for Linux, but still a beta
  5. VLC Media Player: This is also available for Linux
  6. MS Office: OpenOffice is good enough to replace the MS pendant.
  • Backup all your data

Now before you start with installing make sure you got backups of all relevant data. This not only includes your pictures, mp3s and documents, but also your settings, bookmarks and don’t forget to export all your outlook data.

As i don’t have a lot of spare time the next couple of days, this is it until now. I think in approximately a week i have all my data backuped, so that i can go on with my (hopefully just) little project of getting all my software exchanged with open source solutions.