I’m generally not an early adopter

I know people who always manage to get in on things before they get big. You know, those people who loved Alanis Morissette before Jagged Little Pill went multi-platinum. They had iPods before iPods were household words. Right now I’m reading a book called Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America by Bakari Kitwana, wherein Kitwana discusses how white kids who got into hip hop in the 80s were early adopters and pretty serious about hip hop culture. I’ve never really felt that before. I’m not really a trendsetter. For most things—consumer-wise, anyway—I just follow the crowd.

I guess that’s why I blog about Ubuntu and am excited that I use Ubuntu. Desktop Linux (I don’t know if the big thing will be Ubuntu, but it’s looking that way) is on its way up. There may not be a “year of the Linux desktop,” but things are happening (even three years ago, I didn’t feel I could use Linux for my everyday needs; now I’m actually an advocate of Linux), and it’s exciting to be with something when it was just beginning to take full swing. Of course, I’m not like those “elite” Linux users who were using Linux before KDE and Gnome existed. But I still think it’s exciting to be part of this quickly growing phenomenon. Every day there are more Ubuntu users signing up for the forums, asking for help. Of course, some of them give up very shortly afterwards, but many stay and are grateful for the help.

I just hope I won’t be as annoying as those Morissette fans: “Oh, I remember the good old days before everyone and her brother was using Ubuntu. People thought you had to be a geek or a computer programmer to use Ubuntu in those days. You couldn’t even preview an image when you were uploading files using Firefox. Yeah, then Ubuntu got big and the masses have ruined it. It’s not ‘pure’ any more.”