Tech Report's David Morgan replaces his old notebook's Windows XP install with Ubuntu 11.04, otherwise known as Natty Narwhal.

Well, it finally happened. Windows XP is no longer the primary OS on any of my day-to-day machines. The last holdout was my laptop, a gray-haired but solid HP nc8230 rocking a single-core 1.86GHz Pentium M, 2GB of RAM, and a Mobility Radeon X600 graphics chip. The low-brow specs ruled out my modern OS of choice, Windows 7 Professional. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of dropping $130 for another license. A few months back, I moved my home file and web development server from a 32-bit Windows XP environment to 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10. Still pumped about the success of that project, I decided to give Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" a chance to win my heart as the sole proprietor of the HP's hard drive.

First things first: I need to clear the air. I would classify myself as an advanced Linux n00b. I'm fairly comfortable tossing around terminal commands and editing the odd config file (in gedit), but my neck beard has not yet matured to the point where terminal text editors like vi, vim, or Emacs seem like a good idea. My laptop is used for standard productivity tasks, Internet surfing, and some light scripting with PHP and Python. Simplicity, versatility, and usability are valued over geek-cred, compile-from-source, time-consuming complexity. This post contains some personal observations I've made after stepping outside my Windows comfort zone, but it shouldn't be viewed as a full-on Linux distro review. Consider yourself warned.

  Ubuntu ushers me out of the Windows XP era