The move away from Windows

July 9, 2009 | Posted by jont

Some 18+ months ago I finally made the move away from Windows as my primary operating system. The final straw was Microsoft disaster or Vista as its widely know. The escape was gradual before I made the Operating System move I had stopped using office, or more accurately Word to compose and edit documents and moved to Lyx (that in itself can save your sanity, you get to concentrate on your document not dealing with the various was Word insist of ****ing up your layout in the middle of what you are doing.)

I regularly use two desktop machines and two laptops.

Both desktop machines now run Ubuntu Linux. The laptop still has Windows on it for those odd bits of development work for which I am forced to use Windows. One desktop has been set for dual boot, mainly so I can continue to use cubase for music applications.

All the Linux machines also have a copy of VirtualBox installed under which I have a virtualised copy of Windows XP. Why? well I have some projects that require Visual Studio or MS Project. Having virtual box means I can run those without rebooting the machine into Windows. Most of the time the virtualised version of windows is indistinguishable from running natively on the machine.

Weird Side Effects

Yup there are some weird side-effects of doing this. In some cases its been a fight getting MY DATA out of propriety formats into more open formats (often plain text). Strangely each time you manage to extract your data it feels like you are getting something back. Its as is those ********s in redmond had confiscated your data and are now being forced to hand it back.

Its not a perfect solution OpenOffice is annoying, but not as annoying as Microsoft Office.

The other benefit is pushing to use a non microsoft solution will probably annoy your Innovation Prevention department….

A number of colleagues have gone the same route, other have gone to a Mac and use Parallels to use Windows if they really have to. (normally to comply with badly written written web applications implemented by Innovation Prevention Departments who have not worked out that a web based app should work on something other than a internet exploder on a Windows machine)

Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: linux, office, virtualbox | No Comments »