Benjamin Chodroff

I grew up with Windows 3.11 and was quite fond of it. I had WordPerfect, I could run solitaire, and my mom’s IBM PS/2 ThinkPad booted in a flash. I could run some cool games in DOS and make simple programs in Q-Basic. At school, we had Apple II’s. We hated them and commented how much we hated Apple.

Then came Windows 95 and I had all sorts of internet fun. I remember camping out in front of my computer in sixth grade (1998) and installing each diskette of Windows 98 + Plus! There had to be over 40 disks to get that puppy installed. It was hardly worth it as my computer crawled after the installation. Oh, and then came Windows 2000 and life was good. Even as Windows XP came out, I was unimpressed with it’s poor driver support and was quite content with the rock-solid Windows 2000.

Eventually I made the switch to XP. Around this point, I was looking for alternatives and installed Red Hat 6.2. I was impressed but utterly lost. I have to use command line? What are packages and where are my executables? Who is Samba and why is it so freaking hard to get to work? It wasn’t until college that I got serious about Linux. Joe Reed introduced me to BSD and I really learned how to run a *Nix operating system. Anthony Diak convinced me to install Slackware. Then I switched to Gentoo and stuck with it for two solid years. I moved everything over to Gentoo and learned to live with it. I was able to do all my multimedia, office work, and even set up an 11.3 sound system with my roommate. Life was good.

Then the broken packages started to occur. Realizing that recompiling everything was a complete pain in the ass, I decided it was time to find a new OS. I started working with IBM at this time and realized SUSE 9.1 would be the ideal choice since they supported it. I stuck with SUSE for a little over a year. I switched to Suse 10, and then 10.1. I grew tired of how slow it was to boot. I was even more frustrated with the Yast package manager. While I loved that Yast never broke anything, ever, it was incredibly slow to start up. Furthermore, it is fairly rough around the edges to import Package Sources which are required to download some of the basic programs. I installed Suse 10.2, and they improved the package manager speed considerably, it was still slow.

I jumped ship. I gave Ubuntu 6.10 a very short run. Wow! Now this is speed I loved about Gentoo, but without the headache! I was a little annoyed that KUbuntu was buggy since I was a big fan of KDE, but I quickly learned that Ubuntu had Gnome set up much better than I remembered with Gentoo. The network manager for controlling wireless vs wired network was still shoddy. I was also still experiencing random drops off the wireless network. This was probably a bug in the wireless drivers, but I really don’t care who gets it working – just that it works.

It’s been over 4 years, but I have decided to see if the grass is greener on the other side. I still don’t have the money for a Mac Powerbook (or trust me - I would buy one in a second), but I did manage to get Windows Vista Ultimate from MSDN. I dumped my Linux partition entirely and I’ve decided to give Windows another shot - just to see what I’m missing (or gaining). So far, my experience this week has been relatively positive. My wireless support is incredible and I’m easily switching networks as I plug in or go wireless. My download speeds are also much faster. I am *blown away* by Office 2007. I have had little problems finding driver support for my devices. This was a big improvement from the early days of Windows XP.

On the downside, Windows uses a ton of disk space. I have not even finished installing all my programs and I am using over 25 gigabytes of space. This does not include my documents and other media. In Linux, I was using about 12 gigabytes worth of space to do exactly the same functions. Then again, those functions did not always look as pretty! Of course, the problems I have had with Windows in the past are not in the first week - but a couple weeks down the road. Time will tell if I stick with Windows. I am going to give it a fair shot.