Hello fellow LoCo Ubuntu ambassadors and users!
I've been using a promoting Ubuntu for some time now, but I just recently discovered this PA LoCo team. Go figure. It must have been in my blind spot for a while. :)
I live in State College and I work for Penn State University. To be specific, I am a software engineer for a Penn State entity by the name of "Penn State Facilities Engineering Institute" (non-profit), that has roots in the Penn State College of Engineering here at "University Park". We design, implement, and maintain databases and their front-ends for state agencies, including PennDOT, Dept. of Corrections, Dept. of Public Welfare (DPW), Dept. of General Services (DGS), and the State System of Higher Education (SSHE).
I use Ubuntu (Gutsy 7.10) on two PCs that are dedicated to MythTV. They are certainly HTPCs, as their primary purpose is to schedule, record, and playback TV shows and movies.
As a native Microsoft DOS/Windows users (ever since MS-DOS 3.3 and Windows 3.0), it has been a struggle for me to adapt to Linux. I worked in the IT world for quite some time as a network and PC tech for companies and organizations who were all using PCs with Windows. I didn't even know about the free, open source operating systems until I became friends with a System Administrator at a school district where I worked. He introduced me to FreeBSD and the Debian distro of Linux. I was blown away that it had a community so in tune with each other, all developing software for the greater good.
At that time, Debian was still very much at a tinker's maturity level, because Xwindows wasn't even included unless you specifically told it to install Xwindows and some desktop manager. So it never really grew on me.
I then discovered Ubuntu many years later when a co-worker introduced me to it after he received an official Ubuntu LiveCD in the mail. Up until this time, I had the old-school stereotypes of Linux as such another confusing *nix O/S with an elitist community that wasn't interested in helping Windows converts. I visited the community both on the forums and irc, and was simply amazed by the supportive and caring environment. So, I tried to set up Ubuntu Dapper (6.06) with MythTV, but ran into all sorts of issues since MythTV 0.2 wasn't an officially supported package at that time. I gave up, but kept my faith in Linux and installed Fedora Core 5 instead. I got that working just fine.
A year or so later, and I just recently rediscovered Ubuntu with Feisty and Gutsy (7.04 and 7.10). The change seemed to be immense for me since 6.x. Specifically, I see an easy way for NVIDIA restricted drivers to be installed, supported MythTV 0.2, a more streamlined software updater, and Compiz, specifically my favorite, Compiz Fusion.
However, I am still stuck using XP one two systems. I'm a gamer at home, but only because I'm really a hardware enthusiast, building my own modded PCs with the latests gaming mobo and video cards. I'm still really a casual gamer, but I do enjoy many of the latest RPG titles. I've been lazy to transition to Ubuntu on my gaming rig, but I have researched and found that all of my current games are supported in Linux under either Wine or Cedega.
At work, I'm still stuck with XP because we are a *groan* Microsoft-based business with MS-SQL, Visual Studio and .NET, as well as the entire College of Engineering which has a Windows domain we need to log into. They are probably ways around this using Samba, etc., but it's an uphill battle with all of the red-tape surrounding Penn State policies. Still, I push for open source software where I can. We are currently entertaining the idea of Subversion instead of our outdated and limiting MS Source Safe.
This is one of the reason, along with my hatred of Microsoft Vista, that I created something I call a "Vista Board of Shame". Check it out on my 2geek.org blog. I showed it to as many co-workers as possible, complete with a "solutions" fold-out with an article on Ubuntu, and copies of free Ubuntu 7.10 LiveCDs. Since I'm on this topic, would anyone like to have this display for their next LoCo install-fest?
Long intro, I know... sorry about that. :)