I’m a UNIX junkie, particularly BSD. I’ve run FreeBSD for years. Just recently, I cut over cold turkey to Ubuntu. It’s hardcore enough for me (just a slick layer on top of Debian), but polished enough for less technical family members to easily use. I honestly never thought I’d see a premium environment that was Open Source, but I’m now a believer.

Ubuntu has great desktop environments, easier updates than Microsoft and good applications support. Even the compatibility stuff is remarkably solid. OpenOffice handles 95% of MS Office, GIMPshop is an easy jump from Photoshop, etc. Wine and VMware allow you to invoke Windows applications if needed (which I’m finding is very rarely). And Ubuntu offers long term support (LTS) releases spanning 3 to 5 years — very uncommon for Linux.

The Open Source community gives MS a lot of guff, and rightly so, but version support is one place where MS leads the way. I’m hearing a lot of folks say that XP is EOL as of 2009, and that they’re being forced to move to Vista. That’s not exactly true. Mainstream support for XP is EOL in 2009, but extended support (including security fixes) runs through 2014. Think about that for a moment; XP came out in 2001 and will be supported for the better part of THIRTEEN YEARS.

Unfortunately, application vendors are going to force you to move to Vista before 2014. Of course, more and more of them are embracing Linux as a second supported platform, so maybe you won’t be forced after all. MS will almost certainly have Vista’s successor ready by then as well, so they’ll have another chance to get it right.

I’m going to actively recommend against running Linux on the desktop.

Linux is a nice OS. It’s stable and it performs very well. But for normal every day use the desktop envrionments are

Just

Not

Ready

Now I know, the stallmaniacs and torvaldians will stomp and whine and they have a point. It’s really pretty close.

But it’s “just kludgey enough” that it’s frustrating. Media? Well… yeah, if you have the right codecs which, by the way, aren’t free. And if you can find a player that “just works” instead of “sometimes works.”

If you’re a hacker and you like ripping out the guts and hotwiring things at the expense of usability, rock on. Go for it.

But if you just want a damn machine that works and doesn’t provide you with endless obstacles to getting things dones, stick with Xp. or, get a mac. Those are pretty nice :) (if you can acclimate to the change in UI look and feel.)

SeeDub, I remember that post–another excellent reason for me not to buy a Dell laptop. I love my Dell desktop but have seen nothing but trouble out of their laptops.

My husband, whose business is software development and sales, has had nothing but trouble with his company’s Vista machines. His programmers and technicians are the people who build and maintain monster systems — and they can’t get their stupid Vista PCs to do the simplest things. He’s found ways to work around it but why should he (or any of us) have to do that?

And if these technologically knowledgeable people in my life are having trouble with Vista, when my XP machine dies I think my only choice is to go with Mac. I might just do it out of protest.

MS is a monopoly that demands that you buy their new product every few years, yet creates a crappy product that comes close to ruining your life (Windows 98 was another mess). If they’re going to bring out new things you have to buy, they should at the very least BE BETTER.

So far my main complaint against Vista–and Dell–was here: http://junkyardblog.net/archives/2008/04/grrrrr.php