Microsoft has a reason to be jittery

AS I POINTED in my 100th post in the other blog, I have been a Windows user since computing hooked me as a college student and a greenhorn government worker.

But last Saturday, I finally got to handle a PC running on KDE, a UNIX/Linux variant, in the internet cafe of my niece in Pili. At first I was disoriented with the logic of the whole setup--the way I was disoriented with the 'new' Filipino that Irvin blogs about courageously, I think. But in the end, I managed to complete the task I set out to do, which involved

1. Locating the flash drive which the PC recognized seamlessly;
2. Finding and opening the text and image files associated with that post; and
3. Uploading them into Blogger Beta using the really intuitive and intelligent Mozilla Firefox.

I haven't even touched Ubuntu, to which Chin Wong, Master Jessie and Dune Padre swears by; but to which Joel, my niece's hubby, will definitely not agree.

But it was a vastly different Linux I saw and ran for a brief moment last Saturday, lightyears ahead of its incarnation in early 2000 that was no longer text-based (as in MS-DOS), but certainly not very user-friendly. Its graphical user interface (GUI) is almost Apple-like but has a distinctive feel and look that Microsoft users cannot sneeze at. And as Joel said, not prone to viruses, worms, malwares and other security hazards that have become synonymous with Windows.

And most important of all, open-source and BSA-immune: the bottomline for the individual computing enthusiast who does not have the financial muscle that corporates have.

Now I really believe Microsoft has a reason to be truly jittery.