Windows Vista – Ubuntu – Windows 7

Spending a week with a different operating system on my laptop is like learning a new religion. It’s intensely interesting, insightful, a true learning experience! Ultimately it teaches one what they took for granted about the things they already knew and cherished.

So I spent a refreshing week on the linux side of the operating system fence last week.  In the end, I had to come back to Windows.  It wasn’t the operating system, it wasn’t the software, it wasn’t the stability, nor was it any of the big things that people run into when trying to run any flavor of linux.

Instead, it was the little things – very little things.  Like not having the play/pause, and volume buttons on my laptop not work with the media player.  Or the media player not playing WMA files by default without a trip to the command line to make it work – yeah it matters, I have 15GB of tunes in WMA that I’m not re-encoding.

I ran into a number of things that simply needed a little tweak or manual intervention.  Any one of them nothing at all a real problem.  All the really important things just simply worked.  For example, I didn’t have to find one single driver for my laptop hardware for Ubuntu 8.10 – it all worked out of the box.  My favorite Firefox plug-ins, and therefore my main work environment, were all set up in the same amount of time that it takes on Windows – and worked just as expected.  Email was set up in Evolution quickly and, again, just worked.

No, it was all the little things that added up made me decide I still needed to be running Windows.  I’m less a “techy” person than I have been in the past, and while it’s fun to try new things, and experiment, I need a system that I don’t have to think about or fight with.  I need something that simply works on every level at any point, and for me, Windows is that system.

So I’ll test Windows 7 a bit and then go back to Windows Vista until Win7 is released later this year.