The Office

A bluebell woodland on a Sunday afternoon hike

I would hazard a guess that many of you are reading this whilst in an office. Am I right? There's no shame in admitting it. Well ok, maybe a bit of shame admitting it to your boss who perhaps rightly would rather you were doing whatever it is you get paid for, but it's only going to take a couple of minutes right? Not even that if you skip the boring bits and only glance briefly at the pics.  

The Dovey river wending its way towards Machynlleth and the sea

So in an attempt to alleviate the dreariness of a Wednesday within the four grey walls of the office compound I thought I might expound a little on the joys of the outdoors life. An elegy on the simple pleasures of splitting larch wood on a sunny afternoon perhaps? An ode to the first pod spotted on the mange-tout plants or the first crimson nasturtium flower hanging nonchalantly amongst the leaves? A poem of praise of the rhythmic toil of a good bout of weeding, the satisfaction of a tidy veg bed and a gently aching back? But no, these things will only make you out of sorts. You'll glance at your spreadsheet and your desire will be no longer to massage the figures therein but to get outside, pull on your wellies and grow stuff. And this, sadly, cannot be.

A very exciting pea pod

 

Zoomed in, you can just about make out my polytunnel and garden

Instead I shall divert your attention to a subject just as praiseworthy but not so far removed from the tedious reality of your existence. My parents very generously gave me a laptop for my birthday. You may even be reading this on a laptop – we're on safe ground here I think. It came with a thing called Windows 8.1 squatting on it like a troublesome toad. Despite the laptop having the latest fastest processor that a reasonably priced computer might possibly claim to own (a 5th Generation Intel Core i7 for the technically-inclined) and a decent amount of memory (8GB RAM) it still did not seem as lightning-quick as I had expected. Click the Start button and it might twiddle its thumbs for a few seconds before offering me the Start menu. Apps might take a little while to open. I was slightly bemused. What was going on? Is Windows really that bad?
 
Thankfully (and here we finally get to the praiseworthy subject) there is an alternative, and its name is Linux. You might have heard of it. It is better than Windows. And it is genuinely free. No catches, no pop-up adverts. It's written by people inspired by the philosophy that software should be open-source, so anyone can (again for free) look at how it works and if they want, change it (as long as they continue to make their changes public).
 
I downloaded the most popular flavour of Linux, called Ubuntu, onto my memory stick. You can, if you want, try it out before you even install it on your computer just by plugging in the memory stick. And then if you want you can install it slap bang over Windows, replacing it entirely. Or if like me you want to keep Windows as well, just on the off-chance it might come in useful some day, you have to become a little bit tech-savvy and partition the hard drive so Windows sits in one bit and Linux in the other (as well as a few other tweaks so Windows will let Linux start instead of it).





Joy of joys – it's quick! It starts up quick, it reacts quickly to mouse clicks, apps start when they should do. If you have ever struggled with Windows (especially the latest version 8.1) you could do a lot worse than giving Ubuntu a shot. (Or Mint, another popular Linux 'distro'). Get on board the open-source wagon and wave goodbye to Microsoft at last!