Hooray!\u00a0 Oh no!<\/p>\n
Yes folks, here in Canada, July 1 marks a momentous day.\u00a0 And that day is the 10-year anniversary of the day I decided to ditch Microsoft Windows and switch to Linux.\u00b9<\/p>\n
It was July1, 2007 when I made the switch, and I remember being excited about partitioning the hard drive on my Compaq Persario desktop computer so I could dual-boot into either Ubuntu 7.04 or Windows XP.<\/p>\n
Sadly, I soon found out that switching to Linux is neither easy nor something everyone can or should do.\u00a0 But back then, I also remember how relieved I was when I found out about VirtualBox, and being able to run Windows XP as an application inside my Linux desktop.\u00a0 That’s the only way I can get a decent text-to-speech application to work, the only way I can use MS Paint and Irfanview and the only way I still have a little bit of access to some of the old software I still use from the old Windows 95\/98\/XP days.<\/p>\n
And while Linux is great for basic computing and for most things internet related, it still just won’t work for many things.\u00a0 This is out of the hands of Linux developers in the case of those god damned proprietary plugins like Flash and JavaScript.\u00a0 There are some websites I just can’t use because I use Linux.<\/p>\n
And then there are the god damned baffling stupid things that Linux developers do, like the Unity Interface mess with Ubuntu, or the whole Gnome 3 debacle.\u00a0 It seems that some top Linux devs see themselves as unrecognized geniuses who insist on pushing their “vision” on everyone else, the merits of what they’re pushing be damned.<\/p>\n
So it’s been an odd 10 years.\u00a0 I started out with hope that eventually I’d never need to use Windows again.\u00a0 Yet here I am, still using Windows.\u00a0 I even just bought a gaming PC last year with Windows 10 on it.<\/p>\n
I used to actively recommend Linux to people who were sick of malware and adware and other Windows pitfalls.\u00a0 But after having shit constantly break on me under Linux, having to “fix” stuff from a fresh install just to get it to work in the first place, and seeing that this will never change, I don’t bother any more.<\/p>\n
In fact I recommend people still buy Windows.\u00a0 Especially if you want to play games on\u00a0 your computer.\u00a0 Linux is fucking useless for that.\u00a0 Hopefully Flash and JavaScript will actually die, but I’m not holding my breath.<\/p>\n
Happy anniversary, anyway.<\/p>\n
\u00b9Not entirely.\u00a0 Linux still fucking sucks all kinds of ass for gaming and for text-to-speech applications.\u00a0 Seriously, when was the last time you heard anyone talk about their sweet new expensive gaming rig running the latest version of Fedora Linux on it?\u00a0 Pa-leeeeease.<\/small><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hooray!\u00a0 Oh no! Yes folks, here in Canada, July 1 marks a momentous day.\u00a0 And that day is the 10-year anniversary of the day I decided to ditch Microsoft Windows and switch to Linux.\u00b9 It was July1, 2007 when I made the switch, and I remember being excited about partitioning the hard drive on my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,7,6,26,398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-linux","category-lxde","category-ubuntu","category-windows","category-xfce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8583"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8587,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8583\/revisions\/8587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}