Jumping Ship
I’ve abandonded Windows.
There, I’ve said it. I’ve been using some form of Windows since 3.1, but the time has come to say goodbye. Actually, the time came to say goodbye like, a year ago, but it had become kind of absurd lately. I spend my work day on Linux (SuSE 10.0), and then I’d come home and stare at Windows loading tray applet after tray applet… when you find youself screaming “Sweet mother of God, why would you not have proper pipes” at your operating system, and wisfully staring at package managers, it’s time to switch.
I have edited autoexec.bat files in order to optimize the amount of available conventional memory, and I liked doing it, liked being the sort of person who could. As a PC user, enduring the grotesqueries of that experience is something that we are actually proud of. It’s come a long way since then, jokes about “blue screens” and what not ring like tired vaudeville acts. But those struggles were certainly real, the battle wounds considerable, and now the skin has grown over it and to a certain extent we think this is just how it is.
While Tycho goes looking for the easy mode, I don’t mind editing config files, compiling things, etc. I’m a programmer, after all. But I don’t want my efforts to be in vain. I want to be able to tweak my box into silky-smooth perfection, not spend hours trying to get the bastard number of system tray blinkenlights down to slightly less than a third of my screen without also uninstalling an important driver or two. Explorer taking 30 seconds to open? Little magnifying glass hovering over your proto-files as if to say, “Now where did I put those files of yours… they’re around here somewhere…”? Defrag! Because everyone knows that file managers should bog down like a two legged guinea pig in cooling tar unless every single chunk of every single file is lined up like a rail for it to snort.
Now, I wish this was a post about how much my new Macbook kicks ass, but I don’t have $2000 to spend on another laptop, so it’s about how I’m now using Linux. And you know what? It’s a better user experience so far than Windows. Getting WPA to work was… interesting… but it’s been a breeze.
Ubuntu!
It is so refreshing to be able to smack Ctrl+Shift+Z and get a nice, clean POSIX shell for me to work in. I can automate a lot of stuff, and HOLY CRAP I CAN USE LIGHTY FOR DEVELOPING RAILS APPS!
I’m still keeping Windows around, since I need to use Photoshop and Illustrator occasionally, but it’s the red-headed stepchild on this hard drive now. Yay.
(In other news, I’m almost done with ResponsibleMarkup. It should be out this weekend [I know, I said that last weekend, but this time it's true].)
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