A week later, the speed has gone down, but my paranoia hasn’t. But I’ve been able to use Windows XP for a week without any significant glitches or zombie attacks. I know what you’re thinking now, you’re thinking “You elitist prick, every douche in the world runs XP and gets away with it, why do you make a big deal about it?”. Firstly, go away! we don’t like your kind here, and secondly, I was worried because I had to throw away all my settings (or rather, backing them up) and leave something which I was very comfortable with for some work which I absolutely need windows for.
After a week, I started recollecting how things work, and it isn’t quite bad actually. For an operating system that is six years old from 2003, XP is incredibly stable and powerful. Compare that to some older Linux distros and you’ll see how much they’ve improved and how much they’ll continue to improve over time.
Overall, I don’t see that significant a difference, the speed and usablity is the same. There are some differences, certainly, like drive letters and the inability to execute text files, but at the end of the day, you just need to do work.
Here’s what I feel at the end of the week:
- It’s fine as long as you’re careful, but it’s fragile. It seems that one wrong executable can ruin everything.
- There are incredible 3rd-party tools. I forgot how incredible winamp was, along with great applications like OneNote, clipboard managers, alarm clocks, filesharing clients, etc, etc.
- There’s nothing significant that cannot be done using another operating system. Just that it might be easier or more convenient here.
- Visual studio is great. I got a student license for free, and am pretty interested in the new visual studio 2010 IDE. They even have a swanky podcast called “10-4” which talks about the upcoming features.
- The MSDN library is incredible and the extent to which everything is documented is just mind boggling.
- Firefox and internet usage seems to be a little snappier with smoother rendering and scrolling of pages. It even seems to task my system less.
- The file browser leaves a lot to be desired, also lack of a console is difficult sometimes
- I’m planning to look into virualization and to see if it might be a good idea to use a virtualized linux distro for specific work.
- Hardware works great. I can plug in my guitar processor to the USB port and it’s recognized as a new ASIO sound card, allowing me to record or filter the sound further in realtime, which is really sweet.
- The fonts are probably the most noticed change for me. Linux, specifically gnome, wastes a lot of screen space with a lot of padding around large text objects in menus and buttons. The menus are smaller allowing for more screen space for the application which really matters.
Some things which I miss from my previous linux installation include:
- Keyboard shortcuts for almost all applications that are commonly used along with sensible keystrokes.
- Seperating system files from user level files.
- The quick-fix development solutions like python+gtk, etc.
This just proves to me my earlier theory that it doesen’t matter what you use to do work, but it’s the work that matters. I’ve seen people spend more time tweaking their .vimrc than actually using vim to do any work with it. Linux users should really get over themselves, because it’s not really that big a deal in retrospect. In fact, I found it more challenging to keep a stable and up-to-date windows machine and keep it free from malware than I did a stable and working linux machine.
Was checking your archives. Excellent post, except I disagree with two points.
Visual Studio may be great, but it is a great resource hog. Using it on Vista with a Gig of RAM is a nightmare. Now don’t say that you should have more RAM. 1GB RAM is still relevant today. Visual Studio may be really good, but it’s bloated for my work (notice the bold text)
MSDN is nightmare. During my work at M$, the reality of this documentation was exposed. It looks as if this documentation is generated from the codebase itself(I think other docs are also generated the same way) For basic/most used classes/namespaces, MSDN is a way to go. For finding out a way how to use some of the less used classes, you are surely going to pull your hair apart. I too had heard about its awesomeness, but sadly it has disappointed me a lot. There isn’t enough sample codes and if there are they are too huge to follow. When I needed code snippets to understand how say “foo” works, the only thing which came to rescue was Uncle Google. Maybe am flawed in my review, but for a framework as extensive and huge as .NET, documentation surely sucks!
Hi Manish,
Visual Studio is by-far the most resource efficient IDE I’ve ever seen. With multiple files open and a web application running, it still managed to stay within 150 MB. I’d used eclipse a lot which is a resource hog, but with RAM being barely 700 bucks a gigabyte, a resource hogging IDE shouldn’t be a concern – especially for a developer. If Turbo C++ is suited to your taste, then I have no qualms
Documentation is telling you syntax and function. Spoon feeding you with exact usage is the purpose of tutorials. Don’t get them mixed up.
A lot of functions I’ve seen have good snippets and tutorials, and you can search the internet like everyone else for tutorials. Heck, even the monodoc is quite passable.
Moreover, while the .net framework is large, they can afford to skip some obscure classes and focus better on the more important ones. You can grep open source mono code to see implementation if you’re that desperate.
If a gigabyte of installable documentation, which is more-or-less plaintext, isn’t enough for you, then there’s something clearly wrong here.