The Surgery

I read the following blog entry with interest: Crossing the Windows pain threshold by IT Wire’s Sam Varghese.

Sam asks, When does one reach the tipping point, the point at which one will not rest until one changes operating systems? Or, to put it another way, what kind of pain threshold are Windows users willing to tolerate before they cry out to be rescued?

Valid questions indeed.  Personally, I reached the tipping point about 18 months ago, when Microsoft introduced the Genuine Advantage validation tool.  This was the beginning of the end for me.  Microsoft seemed to be saying to its customers, “Thanks for buying our software. By the way, we don’t trust you to use it lawfully, so we’re going to make sure it’s encumbered with oppressive distribution restrictions.  And bloatware which slows down your system, makes more demands on your time and randomly returns a ‘false positive’ on your legitimate installation anyway.”

Forget the dual-boot, Sam.  I say just go single-boot Ubuntu.

I am quite happily running my Ubuntu machine without anti-virus and anti-spyware software. (Although I do have server-based anti-virus - ClamAV - and server-based anti-spam - SpamAssassin - running on my mail server.)

With Ubuntu I can read mail, surf the web, download and listen to podcasts, watch funny videos that people email me, create documents, spreadsheets and corporate presentations.  I can Skype, I can send instant messages with MSN, Yahoo and the likes, I can open Adobe Acrobat documents, print them locally, across the LAN and over the internet, and even waste hours with the Ubuntu distribution of Google Earth.

The only limitation with Ubuntu and other alternative PC distributions is that the mainstream development community isn’t always releasing applications to run on these platforms. Windows and Mac are still the desktops of choice for most users.

For me, some applications can’t be replaced. The few core applications which I use for business and pleasure, and can’t do without, include Adobe Photoshop for graphics editing; Adobe Audition for audio editing; and Macromedia Dreamweaver for website design. In my opinion these are the best tools for the job, but they aren’t yet available for the Linux desktop.

However what frustrates me even more are the proprietary, redundant applications which don’t need to exist in the first place, that manufacturers force us to use.  A classic example is Sony’s SonicStage and Disc2Phone applications, which you’re forced to use to transfer audio between your Mac/PC and your portable music device… despite the fact that your file browser of choice would do a perfectly acceptable job.

So what does this mean?  It means that I’m forced to maintain a working Windows machine, to support these applications.  In Sam Varghese’s language, although I’ve reached the tipping point, I still can’t abandon Windows.  I’d love to, but I can’t.  Not just yet.