Yes, It’s Windoze, by jhary

I have been a Mac user for years. Even during Apple‘s dark ages, I was still a supporter. I have personally owned at least two dozen Macs, purchased thousands more in Apple software and hardware (I’m on my fourth — sixth if you count the broken ones and the missing one — iPod), and I really have no plans on using any other operating system for my day-to-day work in the near future. Yes, I’m a Mac guy, and I plan to stay that way. However, one must keep an open mind.

I’ve never liked Microsoft, and I am not alone. Their questionable business practices aside, Windoze just sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, and sucks. My own experiences have shown me that the Mac is just more elegant, paying more attention to detail and consistency: keyboard commands are universal, menus contain the same general information from program to program, the GUI is much nicer to look at, and the programs are usually better. In fact, while many might argue that there’s much more software available for Windoze, I would counter by suggesting that most of it seems to be crap. And programs that are free- or shareware on the Mac, require Windoze users to purchase them. In general, Windoze programs seem much more amateurish, bloated, ugly, and insecure.

That said, I am forced almost daily to use Windows. The experience is not pleasant. However, after a discussion with a former student who now works for a local business doing graphic design on a Mac, I began to wonder if it was actually Windows that is bad, or have I just used it in situations that make it bad. To explain: I was pleased to hear that the company bought a Mac for him. He agreed, but had reservations. He said that the IT folks so crippled his OS, that it was almost a burden to use, and no fun at all. In the name of security, they had removed so much of what makes the Mac OS so much better, that it became as dreary as my experiences using the Windows machines on campus. Well, thought I, I have an old machine — let’s try a little experiment.

My old machine used to be LitMUSE, before it was hacked last summer. The machine, one I built myself in 2001, has been languishing in a corner for a few months, and rather than trying to sell it, I thought I could play. I had four hard drives that also need something to do (an 80GB, two 40GBs, and a 20GB), so I put them in removable cases and decided I could try at least four different operating systems, mostly open source, but at least one that is proprietary.

I began with Ubuntu Linux, a distro that is based on Debian. The install was easy and the distro looks good. It comes with much of the good stuff (OpenOffice, Firefox), and a cool GUI-based upgrade system based on apt. Nice, and one of the best aspects of Debian. More about this one later, after I’ve had a chance to play.

Windows. Just the word is frightening. Well, I put in the disk, one I purchased from USF before I left in 2001, and booted her up. After a couple of missed boots — for some reason it just didn’t see the CD — the XP installer finally caught on, like a slow pupil might a difficult concept. Man, the installer is clumsy and ugly. Once, it had to restart because it didn’t see the hard drive. Instead of giving me the option of rescanning, it just gave up: I could only reboot. I thought the error might have been mine — all the drives needed to be set as slaves, but upon checking it, I had done it correctly. The second time, after several minutes of waiting (why is the XP installer so damn slow?), it found and formatted the disk. Forty minutes later (!), I had my fresh install of XP.

The first aspect I noticed was that the sound card sounded awful: full of digital hissing and crackling. Obviously, there was some error in installing an appropriate driver. This actually gave me the opportunity to switch sound cards anyway. I remembered that I had a better card stored away under the bed, so I fetched it and quickly made the exchange. Win recognized the card, but did not have a driver; I had to find that myself. A quick look online had a driver for me, and I was hearing clean sound about ten minutes later. That seemed to be the only install hitch. XP had found all my other devices (NIC, DVD, Video, keyboard, mouse, hard drive) and got them working immediately. I’d thought I’d at least have to futz with the NIC, but XP surprised me. Cool. I plugged in my HP DeskJet, and XP found the appropriate drivers and installed them. Now, granted, Mac OS X does this quickly and automatically without any of XP’s to-do (or ta-da!), but it’s nice to see something happen rather than a digital blank stare.

OK, the GUI is hella ugly. Truly. I mean, c’mon Microsoft, can’t you hire a real design team for this? That XP-blue is atrocious. The Windows Classic theme is not much better, more corporate and functional. Maybe I can find new themes. Well, there’s a way using this, but it’s not free. I ain’t paying. Maybe I can find something else to take care of this problem.

Oh, then there was the upgrade and security fix hassle. The install process for this was pretty straightforward, and XP successfully installed a whole slew of fixes, patches, and upgrades. However, when it got to something called “Service Pack 2,” it got about half-way through installing and the machine froze. I know it froze because I left it to do its thing over night, and the next morning it hadn’t progressed at all. After a reset, it would not boot at all; I kept getting this blue screen that said something about a critical error, or death, or hell, or something. After messing with this for a time, I felt it was easier to try a fresh install. After the new install, “Service Pack 2″ slid in just fine. Wow. That’s kind of scary. Imagine if I had a couple of years of work on the drive? Ew. Strike one for WinXP.

After the dual-install fiasco, I installed an SSH client, Firefox, OpenOffice, QuickTime, iTunes, BitTorrent, GIMP, DivX, and Google Pack. More on this in my next entry, especially the rocking Google Pack!