December 5th, 2007
For more then ten years i was perfectly happy with Windows as my only operating system. I like when things improve and Windows was improved in each version. Hardware compatibility, overall stability, security, user interface: they all changed for better in each version of windows. I was resistant to XP for some time, mostly for dumbed down interface and some hardware problems. They are all fixed now and I’m perfectly happy with this OS. I can do my work, i can have fun and i can store my data.
I was using Windows 2000 for 5 years. I switched to windows XP only when new programs refused to work on it. Direct X SDK, Photoshop and drivers for many new hardware required XP (SP2). Availability and support of Windows 2000 also ended. That means that I’ll soon be forced to move on Windows Vista. And i don’t like to be forced.
I’m pretty sure Microsoft will patch Vista and speed it up in some time and when I’ll be forced to move on Vista it will be one nice and fast OS, like XP was when i finally moved on it. Problem is that XP was released year after Windows 2000 and made the good OS better. Vista was released 6 years after XP and made some things better and most things worse.
In case MS don’t succeed in making Vista a great OS i want to have another choice. Some time ago I tried some Linux distributions on virtual machine and now I installed Ubuntu 7.10 as dual boot to XP. My plan was to have XP as my primary OS and Linux as test OS which I can freely explore and test. If something goes wrong I can always use windows.
Soon I had another plan. Since NTFS is now read/write supported on Linux, I could use all my data without problems. Plan B is to try and use Ubuntu as my primary OS. For that I need to have all my hardware recognized, Office tools, internet browser, mail reader, instant messenger, music and video player installed. Ubuntu had all these out of the box (or to be precise, CD image). I just started using it.
Now I have greatest dual boot system I ever had. Clean installation of XP with Visual studio and associated tools and free space and fast system for games. On the Linux system I have everything else.