Some of you may be aware, and others not, that I am a member of a chapter of Toastmasters International, a club which assists its members in public speaking and leadership skills. The particlar chapter to which I belong is based in my workplace, and so all of the members of this chapter are my co-workers. On Wednesday, I presented, as one of the advanced speech projects, a demonstration of Ubuntu Linux, to a mostly non-technical audience.

At the end of the presentation, I posed a simple question: I asked everyone to put their hands up if they felt that this computer was faster than our work-issued laptop computers. It was a clean sweep: every hand went up. I then dropped the bomb that my workstation is, in fact, about 20% slower* than the work-issued machines, and that the software I chose ad the foundation of the system made all the difference.

My speech was evaluated by one of the non-technical people present, in particular, my evaluator is someone who is notoriously hard on his evaluees. His major coments to me were (a) that unlike most technical presentations, this one was not boring, (b) that I demonstrated a level of confidence that can only come from knowing that my machine was going to do exactly what I wanted it to do, exactly when I expected it to do it, and nothing else.

And that, really, is the key here, isn't it? By eschewing Windows, and choosing instead an operating system based on a far more secure and efficient design, I can expect that my machine is going to do exactly what I expect of it, and do it quickly and reliably. Indeed, if this is not the case with our technologies, then what, exactly, is the point of their existence?

(*For those that care: our work-issued laptops are Intel Core 2 Duo, dual-core, 2.0 GHz. The machine on which I ran the demo is an Intel Atom 330, dual-core, 1.6GHz. Our work machines run Windows XP.)