My two biggest problems with Linux (and they’ve probably both improved considerably in the 8-10 years since I last dabbled with it) are the incompleteness of the interface, making it necessary to locate and hack various obscure configuration files to make changes, and the lack of application compatibility, especially games.

I know WINE has made some great strides on the latter, but the applications it’s compatible with mostly look to be about 5-10 years old. At a bare minimum, I need my Adobe Lightroom and my Madden NFL Football.

I tried messing around with one of those Ubuntu distros that you can run right off the CD, but it revved my fan alarmingly (it sounded like an airplane taking off, and possibly contributed to the premature degredation of my fan and eventual heat death of my laptop) and it wouldn’t mount my existing partitions. I didn’t have the space or the patience to do an install, so the experiment ended there.

Windows is far from perfect, but it’s pretty stable for me (I had six months of continuous uptime on it at one point) and it does everything that I need it to do. Well, XP does, at least. Vista has some serious issues with public wifi and Treos, and has also disabled one of my favorite videocard capabilities, that of detecting video content and sending it full-screen to the TV-out port. MS hilariously claims that they did this to somehow protect our PCs from uncertified televisions.

Note that this e-mail pre-dates Vista by four years. Nothing’s changed.

shut it, Mac & Linux people

Oh, sorry. Actually, for years, my philosophy about what I’d choose to use has been “anything but Windows”. Macs, Linux, Unix, Solaris, they’re all good. And frankly, if it weren’t for Visio’s still proprietary and utterly unfathomable file format, I’d never have a reason to go anywhere near a Window box.

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