A Windows PC Replacement

As a veteran of PC operating system that goes back to 1981, I’ve always used Microsoft operating systems (after the demise of CPM). Even though I’ve dabbled with software code, I’m more of a user, spending a lot of time with various applications.
I’m the kind of person who likes to have some control of my environment, and with PC’s it’s changing both look and feel as well as configuring it to accommodate the style I’m used to.
With the advent of Windows XP and now Vista, I’m going to abandon Microsoft simply because the direction they seem to be taking is akin to the Macintosh environment. This is the environment for simple users where the operating system is tightly structured and customization is extremely difficult. For the limited changes that can be made, the familiar steps have vanished in favor of having to make intensive research to figure it out (if at all).
I first got a clue when Microsoft updated it’s office product from the ’97 version, with the hiding of certain menu items, and using those ridiculous added arrows. For a power user like myself, I get quickly frustrated if I have to use additional mouse clicks that are really not necessary.
Even though I have several PC’s, I do have Windows 98, XP, and (uh!) Vista. I’ve recently been doing a lot of Audio processing, and unfortunately, MP3 players like the Zen series requires XP. However, I’m drawing the line at Vista, it’s the worst Operating System since Windows ME (and please don’t start me of that OS). Vista is so bloated that most of the code must have been written in Basic, and the notion that this OS alone must have a minimum of 2G bytes of RAM and a high end system is ridiculous at this point.
I just love my Windows 98 environment, I keep regular backups and if I have to change the system, it’s a breeze to port over and change all the drivers. I just go into safe mode and delete all the devices in the Device Manager, then after a reboot, the system loads all the new drivers.
I’m not really interested in security, as I have hardware and software firewalls, an Anti-virus that does not run in the background (I manually check things). This together with the ability to restore myWin98 system in minutes, carry out a full defrag in seconds, boot up and shut down much faster than later Windows OS’s with faster processors will keep me going with this OS for years.
However, I do have to keep up with the times if I’m going to be able to keep up with the ways things are going on the web I have to have a system that will accommodate the changes that continue to occur. After some research about what to do, I decided to use a Linux based system that has a Windows98-like desktop. I was quite excited to find out that Kubuntu is one such system.
I made a Ghost of my Win98 system from the drive first as I reformatted the disk. I decided to use the partitioning and formatting feature of Kubuntu's install routine to prepare the drive. I manually set up the following partitions and space:
Partition  Format  Size  Type           Name
1          FAT32   20GB  Primary Active System
2          Ext3    4GB   Primary        SWAP
3          Ext3    56GB  Primary        EXT3
I aborted the installation, rebooted and placed my backup of Win98 onto the Fat32 partition and checked it was OK.
I then installed Kubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn onto the drive, and it took me a while to figure out I had to keep the Fat32 drives listed otherwise Kubuntu does not recognize them (unless one knows how to mount them). I rebooted and ran the updates. Because I wanted maximum flexibility, I also installed the Ubuntu Desktop. This gave me the Synaptic Package Manager, Evolution E-Mail and a few other packages I wanted. I'm amazed with the variety of packages that are available and so easy to install, such as an Office suite, Audacity and Fontforge.