It must have been the first year of desktop Linux when I first played around with it, some time in the late 1990s. In those days we were so primitive we didn't realise that the year of desktop Linux would become an annual celebration. I chose Suse Linux then because it came with two thick printed manuals written in clear, slightly Germanic prose, and it took no more than a month of intermittent work to get the whole thing running to the point where I could read and write emails. All of this was enjoyable, in a rather crossword-puzzling way. There is a peculiar satisfaction to be had from fitting together all the different bits of a Unix command until it does exactly what you want, but of course it has nothing to do with real productivity, or even the experience of using Windows.

The real problem though was that in those days there was nothing remotely resembling a proper word-processor on Linux. Instead, there was Star Office, before it became Open Office. When I realised that it was impossible to set it up to have a non-white, non-glare back­ground to type on without also ensuring it printed every sheet of paper with pale yellow ink, I gave up.

Since then I have occasionally tried out Unixes in the spirit that one would approach a text-only adventure game. The highlight of these adventures came when I managed to get FreeBSD to play music by compiling my own kernel. This was not a pleasure that belonged in the age of the iPod.

Last month I decided to see whether ordinary consumer Linux was useful to normal people. Suse Linux was now up to version 11, and installed beautifully simply, but nothing I could do would persuade it to talk to my printer or USB soundcard. So I tried again with Ubuntu, on both desktop and laptop, and after no more than a week of faffing, I think it's just about OK. Program installation just works. OpenOffice and Firefox are the same programs as I use on Windows anyway. Some things actually work better: it is easier to rotate my screen from landscape to portrait and virtual desktops now work as well as Exposé on a Mac. I think I will soon have synchronisation between desktop and laptop working more quickly and unobtrusively than under Windows.

The system is still ragged at the edges. Neither scanning nor printing work as well and simply as they do on Windows. I've got 100GB of music, much of it classical, ripped on to the hard disk, and there seems to be no jukebox program that copes with it elegantly. I can't find anything as powerful and elegant as Ditto, the open-source clipboard manager for Windows that I have come to rely on. All that does is store everything you put on the clipboard and let you search it for later use. This becomes indispensable as soon as you understand it.

The one indisputable improvement has come on an ageing IBM ThinkPad that I take with me everywhere. Under Windows XP, the window to dial up the 3G modem kept popping up and freezing the wireless connection whether or not the modem was plugged in. So I tried Xubuntu, a version of Ubuntu that has a lightweight and well-thought-out window manager. It's quicker to start up and even to wake from sleep than XP was, and – astonishingly for any Linux desktop – it's not ugly or obtrusive.

The various network connections all work properly and without fuss. The only snag is that the screen grows dark after about 10 minutes even when I am typing, and I have to lean on the special brightness keys to reset it. But these do work after a while. The only Windows program I will miss is Microsoft's excellent OneNote , and that may work under some kind of emulator. I won't be reinstalling Windows, anyway. There'll never be a year of desktop Linux for the ordinary user, because if an ordinary user notices that they are running a program or even an operating system, it has in some profound sense failed. But for people who like playing with their computers, desktop Linux is no longer a text adventure game, unless you want it to be. It is now an undemanding graphical adventure game; and unless you are a serious user of multimedia, Xubuntu at least makes a worthwhile free upgrade to Windows XP.

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