The Linux Experiment  Illustration: Jeff Berlin I knew I'd had
it with Windows when I had a nightmare filled with those little
yellow balloons from the system tray, telling me that I had 3617
critical updates waiting to be installed. What's more, Trojan
horses were prancing across my desktop and worms were crawling
out of my in-box.  I woke up and thought, "There must be a
better operating system." I wanted an OS that didn't need me to
constantly install fixes, that didn't crash at the worst times,
and that wasn't a target of every punk itching to prove his
hacker skills.  I didn't want a Macintosh--for one thing, I
didn't want to move to a new hardware platform. That left me
just one other choice: Linux. But could I really get my work
done in an OS written by a self-organizing online collective? I
knew there were Linux counterparts to many Windows applications,
but given that many of them are free, would they work? Would my
hardware still function? And could I share my work with the more
than 90 percent of t