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Lessons from 2 years without Windows

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Lashiec:
Derrick Sobodash, an American freelance journalist working in China who, in other life, was a well-known translator in the romhacking scene, writes an in depth article over the pleasures and (specially) the pains of running Linux full-time and trying to adapt the OS to fulfill his needs. Note that while the article reads like Derrick wants to escape from Linux at all costs due to the difficulties he encounters, he's still a committed Linux user.


Although I know it's beating a dead horse, most of the other articles of this kind I encountered usually stop at everyday computing instead of going to the core, which I think make this one specially worthwhile. Now, wouldn't it be nice to read a similar article mixing OSes other than Windows and Linux?

A bit offtopic, but this comment cracked me up:

Mac is the OS for rich, trendy kids from New York who like modern art, U2 and white ear buds.
--- End quote ---

Well, looks like I'm a bit closer of being the target user of a Mac :D
via Romhacking.net

urlwolf:
I agree with his experience.
There's no replacement for some windows software.
Which makes sense.

On the other hand, starting IRB (ruby prompt) takes x10 longer on a windows box (blame the filesystem, I guess). That's enough for me to use linux to develop ruby apps.

housetier:
Lesson from more than 2 years without Windows: "and yet it works".

D--:
Hi, thanks for reading my post.

I would just like to stress, as Lashiec did in the thread opening, that I am still using Ubuntu. After that post, I reformatted and put on the new Intrepid, taking note of my own advice. For the most part, it has run great without any customization, and I am much less fearful of the day when I will eventually have to nuke my / and /usr once again.

As for Windows software, one comment made a great point: dual booting is a fantastic solution for many users. Aside from a few applications built specifically to be Wine-friendly, like utorrent, I avoid Wine at all costs. The last thing I want is to fire up an application, work 20 minutes, save, and cry as the entire Wine server dumps because someone forgot to hook an API call used by this application's save dialog.

Criticism is welcome. I wrote this to share what I learned and debunk a few of the conversion myths. For me, Linux is a great experience and a great OS. Your mileage may vary.

nontroppo:
I agree with his experience.
There's no replacement for some windows software.-urlwolf (November 12, 2008, 05:40 PM)
--- End quote ---

Just to mention, all the software he discusses are not "windows" software, as they all run under OS X too (and at least the Adobe apps till CS3, they run better). And IRB starts plenty fast under OS X too :p

But then I love contemporary art and live in metropolitan London; though have no care for white earbuds, nor am I "rich"!

To the nicely written article:

I don't really agree on the issue with virtualisation (not from a linux perspective, but as a general proposition). We run both OS X and Windows XP in parallel and both OSes handle virtualisation fine. I regularly run Matlab and Adobe Illustrator under XP, and Office/iWork/Scrivener/Opera/File manager/Photoshop/chat etc under OS X, both OSes run fast and there is never a lag (3Gb 2ghz late-2006 Macbook). I sleep the machine so never have to deal with windows startup more than once every few weeks.

It seems like virtualbox is an ideal solution (it can't be so much worse than vmware surely?). And virtualisation aids, not hinders migration IMO. My boss is starting to run more things under OS X that he used to under XP slowly, but surely. He builds confidence of the new OS one app at a time, yet still keeps the comfort blanket a full-switch would take away.

Thanks D-- for the writeup! Oh, and some of your China posts were interesting reads too, having worked in Shanghai for 4 months this summer.  :Thmbsup:

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