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Lessons from 2 years without Windows

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D--:
nontroppo: Right you are. VirtualBox is far superior to VMWare in every way save one: 3D support. The video card it emulates is not compatible with the 3D calls required by OpenGL and Direct3D, which is an issue when running some Windows software. It also locks the program out of use to gamers.

Personally, my problem is that my machine is not powerful enough and does not have enough RAM for me to be constantly sleeping an XP virtual machine on top of my OS. I also ran into frequent issues where QuarkXpress would not only crash in virtualized XP, but take the entire VirtualBox program and service with it. On one occasion, the service became perpetually locked eating all my RAM, and even root could not kill it. No choice but a reboot. When it was all up and running, it worked great. However, I cannot handle software going to pieces that way when I'm working on a book ...

I only mentioned those programs as "Windows" programs because I wrote this for users migrating from Windows to Linux. Those programs got their start on Mac, and their Mac versions are most certainly still superior to their Windows ones. I often find myself wishing I had CTRL+APPLE+- instead of ALT+0151 for em dash, as well as the many other characters I frequently need access to in typography (yes, I know that's system wide and not software, but it is part of the experience and there is nothing stopping them from making an equivalent CTRL+WIN+- key sequence in the Windows port). However, I just cannot leverage a jump to Mac. Replacing all my existing software is cost prohibitive, and there's always a worry in the back of my mind that one day, Quark will go back to platform exclusive file formats or something equally crazy. Their compatibility record is atrocious, and I remember the days when to get a file from Quark 4.0 to 6.5, you needed full installs of Quark 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 and 6.5 to open and save it in each new format :(

Darwin:
Hi D-- welcome to DC I read your blog post with interest and really enjoyed the read. I'm just starting to experiment with Linux seriously for the first time (I've had an install hanging around, on and off for ten years, but only to dabble), so  I read your reflections on the whole immersion experience with great interest!

mahesh2k:
Microsoft completed 25 years though, its going to be interesting that how they'll handle "Surface computing" and "Cloud COmputing"

f0dder:
D--: what makes VirtualBox superior to VMWare, in your opinion? I like Virtualization stuff, but vmware has worked so well for me that I haven't really bothered to look at anything else (save bochs and qemu, but those are mostly useful for kernel development and not as much for vm needs).

Btw, as for the ALT+0151 thing, it should be possible to set up some keyboard mapping to give you the shortcuts you want... on windows as well as linux :)

yksyks:
Btw, as for the ALT+0151 thing, it should be possible to set up some keyboard mapping to give you the shortcuts you want... on windows as well as linux :)
-f0dder (November 13, 2008, 08:56 AM)
--- End quote ---

That's exactly how I'm typing em-dash (on WinXP) — using HotkeyP. Very light on resources.

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