About Jan van de Voort

I’ve been around for a couple of years now in the computer industry. I began working in this industry  in 1992 for Packard Bell. Despite, sometimes, lack of quality in the products, the idea of that company was quite good, and revolutionary at that time: mass produce pre-installed computers that were ready-to-use.  Just connect all peripherals, start the machine and start using it. Again, this idea was  really revolutionary, at a time where competitors were just adding a bunch of diskettes with the system, and asking you to do the install yourself.  I myself worked for the french help desk; I I had to deal with al lot of “first time user” cases. I remember a case with a customer who bought a Legend 100 (that’s a “dos” machine) , and complained that he had no Excel on it. So I ask him how do you think you would get Excel on it? And he answered: well just by going to the C drive, and typing in: make directory excel.

Of  course this is a colourful example of how people can think about computers, but it also illustrates the way they think about these machines: they should just do what I ask the … machine to do. And this is where I think that non-Windows systems can fit in: some alternative systems are much, much more intuitive than one could even imagine, since most people only know…Windows.

Ok, back to me. From 1995  onwards, I worked for a company called Tulip Computers in the Netherlands, where I began to discover more than just the desktop, with Novell software (Tulip had a strong connection to Novell), and, from that on, to Novell’s Desktop Management suite: Novell ZENworks.  Just one small leap back to the desktop. ZENWorks at least made it easier to use and manage  it, and much more than that. The current version, ZCM 11, is still a perfect product for managing Windows environments.

After some other job changes, and having worked for a couple of years as a system administrator, I just and really stumbled upon Ubuntu: a totally free (really no costs involved whatsoever) Linux Desktop operating system with a built-in, free Office suite, Internet browser, e-mail client, image manipulation program,  firewall, and much, much  more.  I did not realize, when first using it, that I was using Linux…that just came later.  I was flabbergasted by the ease  of use of it, compared to Windows XP.

Since discovering it, and since then having used it exclusively, I discovered it’s ease of use. Since that time, I have been working with other Linux systems as well, but my favorite remains Ubuntu. That is why a lot of articles on this WordPress blog deal with Ubuntu. I have no direct affiliation to Ubuntu or to Canonical. I just like what they make, and this WordPress blog is intended to add my contribution to a wonderful project.

The opinions on this blog are my own and are not representative of my employers, past or present.