For the past month or so, I’ve done without Windows 7. Not, this time, because of my vast selection of predictable and mostly unfounded anti-Microsoft sentiments. I think I’m done with knocking Microsoft since it sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into the interesting-looking Kin phone and then (at least in my eyes) cynically tossed it aside when it looked like Kin might stamp on the toes of the new Windows Phone release, basically just a rehash of the OS wasted on the mostly unloved Zune media player.
The same sentiment goes for Microsoft’s mot unceremonious cancellation of the promising-looking Courier tablet, which I’m mourning deeply. The same, for that matter, goes for J Allard, a man with the foresight and audience compassion that the company desperately needs, and who actually managed to make the Xbox cool. He left the Redmond giant after, I suspect, having the rug pulled out from under him one too many times. I’m done with rallying against the company because Microsoft is doing a perfectly good job at discrediting itself without my help.
Sorry. Got distracted there. Anyway. Windows 7, which is generally a very good operating system, just doesn’t play nicely with the 1GB RAM I have in my office testbed, an oddly-cased Sony Vaio desktop with a Pentium D at its core. It’s positively sluggish, at times ridiculously slow, like trying to run Windows 95 on a 486 while swimming in treacle on the Moon. Which is why I ditched it in favour of one of my regular excursions into attempting to run Linux on the desktop. Only this time, it appears to have stuck.
Linux Mint is my new desktop OS of choice. It’s essentially Ubuntu without the strict and frankly dull free software ethos, meaning it comes with Flash and multimedia codecs pre-installed and uses a sensible and easy package management system with a wealth of compatible applications. Mint is pretty, it’s full-featured, it works, and I haven’t ditched it for Windows’ sweet embrace since I bit the bullet some six weeks ago. I don’t miss using Windows 7 day to day. Not even a tiny bit. In fact, I resent the occasions when I’m forced to switch hard disks and go back to it for professional reasons. I only use it now when I absolutely have to. Mint does exactly what I need it to. There’s no room for Windows.
That’s not to say that Linux is ready for the desktop. Don’t be stupid, it’s still a long way from that. When I was 11, I was fiddling with Windows 3.1, which in all fairness wasn’t ready for the desktop either, but at least most hardware manufacturers published drivers for it, rather than leaving the community to cook up its own. I had everything I needed to start exploring the PC, breaking it, and making it my own; Windows 7’s ease of use may well kill that impulse in the youth of today.
Yes, Linux is the red-headed stepchild of operating systems, thrown a wonky-eyed soft toy at Christmas and told to play with it quietly in the other room. It has no cuddly PR people, no single point of contact, apart from in commercial versions so expensive and mind-bending that they could never hope to reach my PC. But that also means there are no failed launches or prominent staff defections to get all riled up about. Just incompatible drivers, completely broken release candidates, unfathomable command line interfaces, inconsistent interfaces, and the fact that I can’t legally put OS X on this PC. Because I would. After everything, OS X is my favourite operating system. Please don’t hate me. It wouldn’t do.
