Omar's Blog

Those who’ve been following my blog and my Tweets and my Pownce updates know that I’ve been using Ubuntu at work for the past few months. Today, though, I decided to log into Windows because I wanted to sync up my Treo with the Palm Desktop application (I haven’t done that in a very long time) and I wanted to install a few new programs on my Treo that I’ve found on the web.

I do want to be clear on the fact that I CAN install stuff on the Treo from within Linux, but I just haven’t gotten around to figuring out how to do that just yet (I have a few HOW-TO’s to read). And besides, I have Windows on this computer, so why not boot up, quickly do my business and log back out into Ubuntu?

I’ll tell you why not!

I log into Windows… a process that takes over 6 minutes by the way… we’re talking 6 minutes of the hard drive going crazy, and not being able to use the computer because, for some reason or another, every single Windows program needs to run at boot time and leave some sort of fast-loader application loaded in the task-bar.

Finally the hard drive light starts to flicker down, and my mouse and keyboard start responding to my commands. So I fire up my e-mail program and my browser. It’s been so long since I’ve booted into Windows that Firefox quickly downloads its updates and asks me to restart it. I do, and continue working (Don’t you just love how Open Source stuff just seems to work right). I then decide that I want to listen to some music while I’m working, so I fire up iTunes, which asks me that it needs to download a new version… after the beautiful experience of updating Firefox I figured it’s probably a good idea to have the latest version of iTunes installed, so I clicked on the yes button. While that is going on I download and install the latest version of Pidgin as well… which works beautifully.

Now, here’s the kicker… iTunes finally finishes updating itself and asks me to reboot my machine.

REBOOT MY MACHINE?

Why?

What the hell does iTunes do to my Windows, that it need to reboot it?

You mean the price of upgrading to the latest version of iTunes is 6 minutes worth of “Windows is Shutting Down, please wait…” plus another 6 minutes of “Windows is starting up, please wait…” hell? You’ve got to be kidding me? The sad part of this ordeal is that I’ve noticed that pretty much 70% of all software updates I do on Windows require a System reboot!

What kind of a Micky Mouse, Fischer Price operating system is this? (No offense to those companies which, now that I think about it, have totally kick-ass products that are in no way comparable to the crap that Microsoft sells!). I mean, the only time you have to reboot on Linux is when you update the Kernel, and you can always choose to install the updates and reboot at a later time (like at midnight)… and Linux won’t keep bugging you to reboot every 10 or 15 minutes… it respects your decision to not reboot right away! In the Windows world… if you say, please don’t reboot right now… you get an annoying pop-up every 10 or so minutes asking you to reboot. If you’re in the middle of typing something important, you can easily hit the space bar when the dang thing pops up sending your machine into a reboot… and usually losing all your work.

Why does 90% of the world’s population put up with this sort of lackluster performance from Windows? How come this piece of very badly designed, expensive crap has such a big market share? Why do people now expect their computer systems to fail regularly and stop complaining? I mean you’re paying for the software… it’s not like it’s free… It’s perhaps the most expensive part of any new computer system, yet people have somehow learned to put up with its crap?

Microsoft, you need to get your act together soon… STOP SELLING CRAP. I, for one, am completely fed up with it. That’s right… I’m moving on to better things.

From now on I’m 100% Ubuntu. When people come to me to ask for advice I will tout Ubuntu and other Linuxes as their best option for increased productivity. Not only will they save money, but also time. They’ll see an immediate productivity boost!

It’s interesting to note that using Linux almost exclusively for a coupe of months has made me realize what a piece of crap Windows really is. Maybe that’s why so many people are running to the Mac and to Apple’s offerings. For those people, I only have this to say: Keep your eyes open guys! Use your beautiful Mac products but be sure to keep a copy Ubuntu on your dual-boot systems (Boot-camps or whatever you want to call it), because you never know when Apple will start to act like bullies and start to make dumb decisions regarding their OS similarly to what they’ve done with the iPhone and the AppleTV.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I see MacOS ruling the home, Linux ruling the corporate environment… and Windows, thank goodness, will start to fade into oblivion as people realize that they really don’t have to put up with it’s crap anymore.

Powered by ScribeFire.