The anticipation is so profound, it’s bizarre.

I currently use a computer which most people would not take as a gift: 850Mhz chip. 80Gb hard drive, the CD drive is dead, it’s got two USB V1 ports and no DVD options at all. In brief, a fossil. And in four days I am now due to receive a machine with more than double the chip speed, disk space and RAM.

But the fun doesn’t end there: The fossil runs a dual-boot of XP and Ubuntu 9.10. From Friday I will be an entirely Open Source house – All Linux, all the time. And to be honest the prospect of such perpetual freedom is quite heady.

No more stupid, yellow message balloons; No more ugly, low-res interface, just a smooth, stable OS that’s designed to benefit the user, not the vendor and their friends [nor the 5-million losers who write spyware.]

Who else has done this? Any advice on how to handle the culture shock of being propelled into 24/7 freedom from Redmond-sourced mind control would be welcome. Meantime I’m counting the days…