[TriLUG] Journey to the Wastelands

[Jeff Tickle]

First of all, I hope everyone in TriLUG has weathered this fun little
ice storm safely.

This morning, since I have a nice day off, and thankfully we got our
power back sometime last night, I figured I would check out my Windows
partition for a little bit and do a few things that Wine just won't
handle.  You know, play some GTA3 or Myst III, check around Active
Worlds (www.activeworlds.com) and see if anything is happening there...

How can people stand it?  Windows is horrible!  I'm a relatively new
Linux user, been using it exclusively for about two months now, and wow,
you don't realize how bad things are in the wasteland that is my NTFS
partition until you live without it for awhile!

Active Worlds crashed 6 times in 30 minutes.  Playing GTA3, the system
would spontaneously reboot.  Startup took _FOREVER_.  And with all the
rebooting I had to do, a lot of time was wasted waiting for Windows to
do whatever the hell it is taking its time on...  (gee, wouldn't it be
nice if it had a simple text-based screen that would, you know, give a
short summary of what it is doing, and then perhaps a soothing green
"OK" if things went well, or an attention-getting red "FAILED" if things
went wrong?  Wow, what a novel idea...)

And I found that I have developed habits that make things go so much
more quickly when working with text-based things.  For example, in
Notepad, every time I went to save a file, you would see a ":s" appear
where my cursor once was.  Moving files around using the so-called
"convenient" drag-and-drop method was just downright painful.  So I
tried using the poor excuse for a command line, and my habitual pressing
of the TAB key, of course, did not do what I expected.  It made
drag-and-drop look fast.

Of course I could use Cygwin, but it's never worked quite right for me. 
I can't put my finger on it, but there's just something kinda off about
it.

So, I had planned to stay in Windows all day and play around and stuff,
see if I could remember what was so damn great about it that made
EVERYONE want to pay ungodly amounts of money for it (and its upkeep). 
An hour later, here I am, typing an email, ranting about how much
Windows just downright sucks, in Evolution of course, under Linux. 
Thats my last trip.  Last week, I was 90% Linux.  I still felt this
little attachment... a slight desire to use that painful operating
system which is Microshaft Winbloze, but now, all that has been
eradicated.  As soon as I copy some data over to the Linux partition,
Windows will be gone.  For good.

Sorry.  Just had to rant a bit.  Have a great day.

-J