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Shameful admission time: I switched my home PC back to Windows XP from Mandrake Linux. Why? Well, I thought it would be good to use Linux - get some experience of a Unix platform, stop supporting the kind of idiocy perpetrated by Microsoft, open formats yada yada - all that good stuff.
However, there are just too many niggling problems - my printer stopped working one day, and I can't figure out how to make it work again. I can't easily sync my Palm to my PC. Hardware generally is harder to get working. It's harder to install or upgrade anything. I used to find this kind of thing was a spur to learn more about the platform, but now I just find it's a pain.
On the other side, Windows is now much more stable, more secure - provided you do sensible things like using a firewall, using Firefox, not running as admin when you don't have to - and generally more familiar to me when things don't work right.
So back to Windows I go - at least for the time being. I'm still not enamoured of Microsoft, and I'm not keen on the proprietary file formats (not that it affects me that much - I don't use Outlook, and I can convert Word and Excel to Open Office if need be). I think next computer I buy may be a Mac (Unix and Shinies, as someone put it) but that's not going to be for a year or two.
Posted by MFreestone at September 29, 2005 01:48 PM