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What Keeps You On (or Off) Windows in 2013?
Five years ago today, reader J.J. Ramsey asked what's keeping you off Windows (itself a followup to this question about the opposite situation). With five years of development time gone by for Windows as well as all the alternative OSes, where does Windows stand for you today? (Is it the year of Linux on the Desktop yet?)
I created this name 12 years ago because I was young, immature, and hated Microsoft with a passion.
(typical slashdotter at the time in 1999)
Windows crashed and DOS was horrible though slashdot had its loyalists I should not by 1993 create autoexec.bat files for Monkey Island and another to play Doom because of expanded vs extended memory?? WTF this is a 486 not a 8086?!
Around the time they were asked 10 years ago on what kept me off Windows questions
I tried Linux then and fell in love with the aspects of free software, tons of apps on cd (I was on dialup then), I did not have to pay $$$$ for compilers for game development, could get any gui I wanted, I could get paid a shit load of money if I had Unix on my resume.
I fell in love with FreeBSD. It was stable, never changed, just worked, unless I did something stupid to it. I started disliking Linux. It was beta quality and kept crashing compared to FreeBSD and Solaris. I felt it was the Windows version of Linux where crapware and hardware are thrown on it and it is not tested well.
I took a java programming course and gave up on FreeBSD as I needed Java 5 in 2004. I reluctantly started using XP.
Why in 2013 I stick with Windows
It works and no longer blows and sucks. For the slashdotters who have ran Linux for 10 years you have to ask yourself if your memories of IE 6 and WindowsME still apply today?
Windows 7 is stable, IE 10 is a modern browser and has 90% of Firefox's HTML 5 features, Office has its issues but it still is professional, and Adobe products are nice to have but they also exist on the Mac as well. Windows Server 2012 is ok. It is finally catching up and is finally VM ready.
Linux never just works and has problems with updates with my ATI and AMD hardware due to the lack of a stable ABI. It doesn't have Microsoft Office. Java is butt ugly as the fonts are broken in Debian/Ubuntu distros as the bug is 6 years old now! WTF. FreeBSD is out of the question today as 5.x and 6.x were horrible! I stuck with the 4.x all the way until 4.12 which was now quite stale by 2005.
My exwife asked me (no not flamebait moderators but her real opinion and words) why I use such an inferior system? My response was WTF Windows sucks, Windows blows, Windows is unstable, and went on and on. Her response was well you are the one who always has to reinstall your operating system. My Vista just works? Whose is better now?
She is right. World of Warcraft was a pain with Wine, then I had to get Ventrillo to work, and then Office. In the end it just is not worth it.
I keep CentOS around in virtualbox and VMWare. It rocks as a server
In 2011 after gnome 3 I gave up. Sorry guys. I put Windows 7 on and it just works. I have reinstalled it a few times but that is it. Compared to Windows 3.1 it is certainly tolerable.
http://saveie6.com/
If you look at msdn you will still see some ancient articles of mine. I have written books about .net and c#. When windows 8 was announced I decided that I will switch. Windows 8'to me was a piece of do do. I switched to osx and Linux. And now I use for the most part Linux.
As I trade the market my main concern was excel. But what was interesting is that I ended up not needing it because I changed the way that I write algos. I used to be my algos would use excel as the front end. Now I use HTML. Let me tell you HTML rocks, and excel sucks. What is more impressive with HTML is its ability to do whatever I want. If I want a grid with spreadsheet like functionality it is possible. Do I want to insert a graph, no problem. It really is an evolution.
What made the switch hard was the leap of faith. I have used Linux since 94, but was always a bit disappointed. However now with both osx and Linux I can honestly say windows is not needed anymore. And if you say you need it, then it is because you don't want to make the leap of faith. Especially with osx around.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Every time this type of question comes up someone pipes up with this kind of statement.
It always makes me wonder if I'm the only one that has zero problems with sound? Or pretty much anything? Am I just that lucky and skillful and freaking awesome in selecting hardware?
For other desktop uses I again must just be some kind of freak outlier. The only time I've had problems using Linux in the office was when I worked at places that were outright Linux (really "non-Windows") hostile and would actively prevent you from using anything else or at best just didn't help a lick. If it wasn't that kind of place I had no problems doing everything everyone else was doing. Maybe it was just that my job didn't require me to be some fancy Excel jockey or something.
Am I really alone in that?
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"