I've had several positive experiences lately which I thought I'd share with skeptics. (And remember that when I started this thing I was a skeptic myself -- having been burned by a bad experience with Red Hat Linux back in 2002 -- see here, here and here.)

Digital photos: I took a couple of photos, removed the SD card and inserted it into my USB card reader which I inserted into a free USB port on the computer. A second later and I could see this as a new disk, could edit and copy the photos. Just like that. Couldn't be simpler.

Digital music: Slightly more complicated. I bought a new headset and couldn't initially get it to work. Had to adjust sound settings -- all done through the graphic interface, with no command line stuff, no arcane lines of code. One drawback of Ubuntu is that it doesn't build in MP3, and this for reasons having to do with MP3 being a proprietary format, with OGG Vorbis as the default open source audio format. That's all very nice, but it added a layer of difficulty which is unncessary. It took a few minutes to figure out how to allow MP3s to play on my computer again. In the end, the easiest way to convert some files to or from OGG and MP3 was to do it with a wonderful online service called Zamzar.

Disk space: This is a Wubi issue -- when I set up Ubuntu as a Windows application (rather than with the usual way, which is to partition one's disk) I guess it didn't get a lot of space. So when I tried to move over large music files, it warned me that there wasn't any room. When I got rid of those files, I had no problems. This is one of the reasons why I want to move toward a proper, native installation of Ubuntu without any Windows around -- to ensure that all the space on the hard drive (and it's not a giant hard drive) is accessible.

I have broken one of my rules and invested around £27 in the Ubuntu Linux Bible, published by Wiley. I thought that if everything crashed and I lost all access to the net, etc., this would be the closest I'll get to technical support. In terms of kilograms per penny, this hefty volume seemed the best of an ever-growing list of specifically Ubuntu titles available in shops (Foyles in London has around seven Ubuntu titles, one more than Waterstones).

So, 18 days and counting. If nothing major goes wrong before the 21st, on that day I will put Microsoft Windows XP behind me forever.

P.S. I just discovered that I actually begin running Linux for the first time ten years ago. Google has become my external memory.