It’s been a learning experience, but due to recent problems, its time for SUSE to go away. I’m literally sitting here watching XP reformat my computer…
The decision for this move was based upon updates hosing my system - twice. For some reason, the software in the Open Source Community is built in such a way that if one program requires some piece of software to be a version above what the other pieces need, things can go very badly, even when you check for conflicts… The first time this happened, I installed a brand spanking new update as soon as it was released by Novell. lesson learned after the computer refused to boot. I had very little data on it, so it went away very quickly. This time, I waited 3 weeks before doing an update and almost the same thing happened. This time, my dual NICs went down, BASH refused to awaken from beyond the grave and I couldn’t even get into the software control inside YAST2. After a quick attempt at recovering, my computer was yet again, unbootable. Needless to say, I quickly pulled the IDE drive that had the year worth of software and documents on it (email included) so I could grab it in a few hours without XP trying to do weird things with the drive then let XP reformat my 150GB RAID1 array.
While SuSE was fun, I probably won’t be back to the OSS OS (Open Source Software - Operating System) side of the fence for awhile due to a few reasons. The biggest being the fact that there really isn’t any good version control between all the software packages. If I need K3B (CD Burning Software), I probably have to upgrade a few libraries (think DLL’s in the windows world) in order to install it. At the same time, KDE (like the Windows user interface/GUI) needs those same libraries. Add in a check to make sure everything plays right (works most of the time) and, in my hypothetical case, everything is alright… If a library happens to have changed too much for KDE, *poof*, you lose your Graphical User Interface and you’re stuck in a text-only environment attempting to fix it. I don’t mind text based environments, but I see them more as a means of editing files on a remote server with SSH, not trying to limp my lost box back to life. (Please note for those being picky, this is an extreme situation between two pieces of software I randomly pulled out of the back of my head…)
Why XP? Because I had a spare copy of XP Home sitting here. I refuse to buy Vista when it first comes out (you never buy the first year model of a car do you?) and I refuse to let my main machine just sit here until Vista is in stores. While I’d rather it be XP Pro, I can deal without all the fancy crap for awhile. Later, I’ll probably upgrade or just switch to Vista when the time comes.
Some people may call me crazy for going with Windows again, but I think it’s a reasonable alternative for a few reasons.
- I’m in a Windows only environment doing development work for an IIS based server.
- I’ve actually found myself losing knowledge of how Windows works. You have no clue how stupid it looks when a guy claims to have supported Windows for 5 years and he can’t figure out how to get into the computer management screen (Right Click on My Computer - Manage). Yea, I was really embarrassed to have to ask for help over that one.
- I’m going to be studying for my MCAD, MCP and CompTia Security+ certifications here pretty soon. I need a Windows based environment to study, develop (.Net on Linux? HAHAHAHA, you funny!) and re-learn some of my lost skills.
- Gaming - Wine is nice, Cedegra is about as good, but I’m tired of dealing with constantly having to shuffle around everything to game or even rebooting to game.
- I’ll still keep up with Linux via VMWare (I’ve recently had some very weird experiences using Microsoft’s Virtual PC software.) so I’ll keep up with that side of things. I’ll also maintain my FreeBSD boxes downstairs, which I find are more stable and less finicky than your average Linux based install.
- Its just time to move back to Windows Land…
I really hate to say this, but I really won’t miss the Linux environment. If I wanted to do anything, from setting up my sound to installing software to burn CD’s, it was a headache, sometimes taking over a day to solve. Some things are overly customizable, others are clunky, but in the end, I honestly think that Microsoft has a better OS product.
