Microsoft
Windows 7: I couldn’t care less
So some “top secret” screenshots have been making the rounds of various gadget blogs, purporting to be leaked demos of Windows 7 — except they probably aren’t, according to some. And tonight at the All Things D conference (which I kind of wish I had been able to go to) Bill Gates and Steve “Monkeyboy” Ballmer will be showing some highlights of the new operating system. A writer at Ars Technica says he is “pumped” about this news. Personally, I couldn’t care less. Vista was effectively a non-existent event for me, and Windows 7 isn’t likely to change that.
I’m not one of those Mac fanboys you see around the blogosphere, mind you. I like the Mac interface a lot, and I would happily use a Macbook Pro if someone wanted to donate one, but at the moment I’m using a bog-standard black box that I bought for $350 at a local computer outlet. It doesn’t run Windows though — it’s running Ubuntu with the KDE desktop, which provides all kinds of icons and toolbars and touchy-feely GUI stuff that Windows users (and Mac users) like. I switched to Ubuntu about a year ago and haven’t looked back.
I still have a Windows machine on my desk as well, but I’m running XP. Why? The same reason I suggest to all of my friends that they do the same: there simply isn’t any compelling reason to switch to Vista, period. When I moved to XP it made a lot of sense — there was multi-user switching (great if you have a family) and better networking support. Vista, as far as I can tell, has a bunch of eye-candy interface stuff that does absolutely nothing apart from hogging a lot of RAM. I use the Windows machine for things that I can only do on Windows, and that’s mostly work-related (Outlook, etc.).
But doesn’t Ubuntu take a lot of fiddling? Sometimes. I’ve had to look some things up on the Internet to figure them out. But then, I had to do that with Windows too (and with a Mac, to be honest). And Ubuntu has come a long, long way from the earlier versions of Linux I played around with — it is almost plug-and-play with just about everything, including printers, wireless, cameras and USB devices (although it’s not so good with webcams). And it handles my iPod better than a Windows machine with iTunes ever did. Windows is now like that crazy old uncle I tolerate, but don’t really pay much attention to.
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excited by Windows too :-)
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and software and user-customization features than you can shake a
stick at. Macs are easy to use, but they are very difficult to
customize beyond a few small details (or at least so I've found),
whereas Ubuntu is almost infinitely customizable.
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amount of software available, all of it free, but how painless it is
to install. If you can think of a program you need, searching Adept
will turn up about fifteen different solutions, and clicking once
installs the ones you want. Even if you download one from the Web, if
it's a Debian file then you can right-click it and install it
instantly -- a lot easier than Linux installs used to be.
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Hopefully, perhaps when some patents reach their 20 year mark, we can see MAC making some concessions to make the MS to Apple transition a bit smoother.
Anyways, that said. Excellent and succinct post.
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at least if you want to say that you are running it, don't bash other OS. I hate those kind of people...
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